ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Arthur Edward Guinness, Lord Ardilaun — 'A Practical Patriot'

Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair, 8 May 1880

Arthur Edward Guinness, Lord Ardilaun — 'A Practical Patriot'
Leslie Ward ('Spy') draws Lord Ardilaun — Arthur Edward Guinness, heir to the Dublin brewing dynasty and Conservative MP — as a lean, slightly stooped figure in a dark frock coat and buff trousers, hands thrust behind his back, rendered in the exaggerated-head, elongated-body formula Ward perfected. The caption, 'a practical patriot,' is a pointed double-edged compliment: Guinness had recently purchased and gifted St Stephen's Green to the people of Dublin, an act of conspicuous patrician benevolence that neatly deflected Irish nationalist pressure on Protestant landed wealth. Ward's caricature carries no ethnic distortion; the joke is purely social — old money performing civic virtue just in time to stay respectable.

Leslie Ward Public domain