ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale — 'The Nobleman of the Garden'

Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair, 16 June 1904, by Leslie Ward ('Spy')

Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale — 'The Nobleman of the Garden'
Leslie Ward's chromolithograph presents the 1st Baron Redesdale in three-quarter profile: white-haired, white-moustachio'd, dressed in a double-breasted frock coat and pinstriped trousers, top hat firmly on, a furled umbrella clasped across his body like a field marshal's baton. The caption 'The Nobleman of the Garden' acknowledges Redesdale's reputation as a serious horticulturalist — he created the celebrated garden at Batsford Park in Gloucestershire and wrote authoritatively on Japanese landscape design, drawing on his years as a British diplomat in Tokyo. Ward's caricature flatters rather than wounds: the exaggerated torso-to-leg ratio and walrus moustache are gentle, befitting a peer whose public profile was patrician and bookish rather than politically combustible.

Leslie Ward Public domain