ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

'Greece' — King George I of Greece

Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair, 21 October 1876. Chromolithograph by Leslie Ward ('Spy').

'Greece' — King George I of Greece
Ward's caricature presents King George I — born Danish prince Wilhelm of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, elected to the Greek throne in 1863 — as a lanky English gentleman rather than a Mediterranean monarch. The figure wears a black frock coat, grey trousers, and a tall silk hat, carrying a slender cane with casual authority. The caption reads simply *'Greece'*, the magazine's habitual shorthand for political territory. Ward exaggerates the King's narrow, angular frame and ginger moustache, playing on his conspicuously Northern European appearance — an irony inherent in Greece's imported, Protestant dynasty ruling an Orthodox kingdom. The joke is dynastic incongruity rendered as Pall Mall nonchalance.

Leslie Ward CC0