From the exhibition
Finley Peter Dunne ('Mr Dooley')
Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair supplement, 27 July 1905. Chromolithograph by Leslie Ward ('Spy').

Ward's full-length caricature shows a trim, bespectacled man in a dark checked suit, one hand pocketed, the other holding a lit cigarette with studied nonchalance. The caption reads simply *'Mr Dooley'* — the fictional Irish-American saloonkeeper whose dialect columns made Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) a transatlantic celebrity. The portrait is notably genteel: no stage-Irish exaggeration, no grotesque ethnic coding of the kind Vanity Fair sometimes visited on Irish subjects in earlier decades. By 1905 Dunne was a guest of presidents and London editors alike, and Ward renders him accordingly — a man of letters in good English tailoring, whose Irishness is carried entirely by the fictional pseudonym beneath him rather than by any physiognomic distortion.
Leslie Ward Public domain