From the exhibition
'Round the World' — Thomas Brassey, M.P.
Carlo Pellegrini · Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape'), Vanity Fair, 6 October 1877

Signed by 'Ape' (Carlo Pellegrini), this chromolithograph presents Thomas Brassey—Liberal M.P., yachtsman, and future Governor-General of Victoria—in three-quarter profile, holding a brass sextant with the practiced ease of a man who had circumnavigated the globe aboard his schooner *Sunbeam*. The caption 'Round the World' nods directly to that celebrated 1876–77 voyage, which his wife Annie Brassey would make famous in her bestselling memoir. Pellegrini's caricature is relatively benign by the standards of the series: the head is enlarged and the jaw prominent, but the treatment flatters a wealthy public figure rather than satirising him. The politics are Whiggish admiration—empire-minded gentleman-science, navigation as aristocratic virtue.
Carlo Pellegrini CC0