'Ancient Painting' — Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Signed *Ape* in the lower left, this chromolithograph caricatures the Dutch-born Royal Academician Lawrence Alma-Tadema, then at the height of his fame for meticulously researched paintings of Greco-Roman antiquity. Pellegrini bends the painter forward into a scholarly stoop, enormous rounded back dominating the silhouette, small spectacled face peering downward at a panel or canvas held in both hands — the obsessive connoisseur physically consumed by his subject. The caption 'Ancient Painting' doubles as professional label and gentle joke: here is a man so absorbed in antiquity he has become slightly antiquated himself. No ethnic caricature is deployed; Pellegrini's exaggeration is purely occupational, mocking learned pedantry with affection rather than malice.