Carlo Pellegrini — 'Diplomacy' (Lord Lyons), 1878

Signed Ape — Carlo Pellegrini's pseudonym — this chromolithograph caricatures Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 2nd Baron Lyons, Britain's Ambassador to France and one of the era's most respected diplomatists. The plate caption reads simply *"Diplomacy"*, Vanity Fair's customary one-word editorial verdict. Pellegrini renders Lyons as a stout, ruddy-faced man of late middle age, top-hatted and double-breasted in funereal grey, one gloved hand pocketed — the very image of patrician immobility. The silhouette exaggerates his girth; the face carries a wary, compressed expression that reads as shrewdness withheld. The composition argues that effective diplomacy is less eloquence than mass: this man does not move; events arrange themselves around him.