Sir Leslie Matthew Ward (1851-1922) British, Original Vanity Fair Lithograph. Behind glass. Titled "Men of the Day No. 71" Dated "Nov. 1, 1873." Signature "Spy" bottom middle. Full-page accompanying article attached to reverse, identifying subject as Dr. Edward Vaughan Kenealy. Certificate of Authenticity attached to reverse. Tag indicates frame is from Carroll-Condit Galleries, White Plains, NY. Depicts a caricature of a wigged barrister. 

Overall Size: 20 3/4 x 15 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 14 x 8 1/2 in. 

#5042 . 

Sir Leslie Matthew Ward (1851-1922) was a British artist who painted 1,325 portraits which were regularly published by Vanity Fair, a British weekly magazine that ran from 1868 to 1914. He worked almost exclusively under the pseudonyms “Spy” and “Drawl.” The portraits were produced as watercolors and turned into chromolithographs for publication in the magazine, then reproduced and sold as prints. Such was his influence in the genre that Vanity Fair caricatures are sometimes referred to as “Spy cartoons” regardless of who the artist actually was. His caricature portraits, almost always full-length, usually distorted the proportions of the body, with a large head and upper body supported on much smaller lower parts. Ward came from a long line of artists, as his great-grandfather was the famous animal painter James Ward and his mother and father were both history painters. Although they never gave their son formal training, they and their many artistic friends encouraged the young Ward to draw, paint, and sculpt. Ward started caricaturing while still at school at Eton College, using his classmates and school masters as subjects. He left Eton in 1869 after performing very poorly, and his father encouraged him to train as an architect. Ward spent an unhappy year in the office of the architect Sydney Smirke until a family friend, the artist W. P. Frith, spoke to Ward’s father on his behalf, allowing Ward to leave employment and enter the Royal Academy Schools in 1871. In 1873 he sent some of his work to Thomas Gibson Bowles, the founder of Vanity Fair, who immediately hired him to replace his regular cartoonist Carlo Pellegrini (known by the pseudonym “Ape”) and gave him his own famous noms de crayon. He continued to work for Vanity Fair for over forty years, making between £300 and £400 per portrait, ultimately producing more than half of all the caricatures the magazine ever published. In 1899 he married the society hostess Judith Mary Topham-Watney, and they had one daughter, Sidney. In 1918 he was knighted, but after being without steady work for several years he suffered a nervous breakdown and died suddenly of heart failure.

Good.