Ira D. Sankey — 'Praise and Prayer'

Carlo Pellegrini's chromolithograph presents the American evangelist Ira D. Sankey — Dwight L. Moody's celebrated singing partner — mid-phrase, head tilted upward as though mid-hymn, a sheet of music or scripture held at chest level. The caption, *Praise and Prayer*, neatly encapsulates Sankey's public role: he was the melodic engine of the Moody-Sankey revival crusades that electrified British audiences in 1873–75. Pellegrini exaggerates his broad, fleshy nose and ruddy complexion in the studio's habitual manner. The *Vanity Fair* editors clearly regarded the American revivalists as legitimate cultural phenomena, worth placing among politicians and peers as genuine shapers of Victorian opinion.