ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Frederick George Jackson — 'Franz Josef Land'

Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair, December 1897. Chromolithograph by Leslie Ward ('Spy').

Frederick George Jackson — 'Franz Josef Land'
Leslie Ward's full-length caricature presents the Arctic explorer Frederick George Jackson, aged 37, in heavy corduroy cold-weather kit — belted jacket, baggy breeches, dark knee-boots, and a close-fitting leather cap with chin-strap. He stands arms folded, a posture of stolid self-possession rather than heroic swagger. The caption 'Franz Josef Land' anchors the portrait to Jackson's 1894–97 British expedition to that remote Arctic archipelago, during which he famously encountered Fridtjof Nansen drifting on the ice. Ward's caricature inflates Jackson's broad, mustachioed face and thickens his already substantial frame — standard Spy exaggeration applied to a man whose bulk was genuinely his public reputation.

Leslie Ward Public domain