From the exhibition
George Russell, MP — 'Wokingham'
Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair, 2 March 1889

Leslie Ward ('Spy') renders George Russell, Liberal MP for East Berkshire, in sharp profile: top hat, black morning coat, tan trousers, hands pocketed, chin jutting forward with patrician assurance. The caption 'Wokingham' anchors him to his constituency rather than his name — a Vanity Fair habit that assumed readers already knew their men. Russell was a landed gentleman-politician of moderate reforming instinct, and Ward's line captures exactly that type: upright, self-possessed, faintly immovable. The caricature exaggerates the long nose and receding chin without ethnic malice; its comedy is purely social, targeting English upper-class complacency rather than anything beyond class. The chromolithograph was printed by Vincent Brooks, Day & Son, the firm that produced virtually every plate in the series.
Leslie Ward Public domain