Leslie Ward, 'She' — Henry Rider Haggard

Signed 'Spy' in the lower left, this chromolithograph depicts the novelist H. Rider Haggard in strict profile, rendered in Ward's characteristic full-length caricature style. Haggard wears a dark frock coat, olive-grey trousers, and polished black shoes; a gold monocle chain loops from his lapel. His features are sharply elongated — the prominent nose and jutting chin exaggerated, as Ward's method required — but without ethnic malice; this is the standard gentlemanly lampoon of a tall, angular Englishman. The caption, *'She'*, anchors the image to Haggard's 1887 sensation novel of the same name, then at the height of its fame. The plate flatters as much as it mocks: to appear in Vanity Fair was itself a mark of cultural arrival.