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From the exhibition

Sir William Withey Gull, Bart.

Carlo Pellegrini · December 18, 1875

Sir William Withey Gull, Bart.
Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders the royal physician Sir William Gull—Physician-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria and the man who treated the Prince of Wales during his near-fatal typhoid of 1871—as a squat, brooding presence in a dark frock coat, one hand gripping his lapel, the other thrust behind his back. The caption plate reads *Sir William Gull, Bart. / December 18, 1875*. Pellegrini exaggerates Gull's heavy brow, pugnacious jaw, and forward stoop to project intellectual severity bordering on menace—the caricaturist's shorthand for a self-made man of enormous professional power. No ethnic caricature is deployed here; the distortion is purely temperamental, emphasizing cold diagnostic authority over social warmth, which matched Gull's contemporary reputation as brilliant, brusque, and clinically ruthless.

Carlo Pellegrini Public domain