Vanity Fair Caricatures have arrived!

Having admired the Vanity Fair Caricatures owned and displayed by my fellow blogger ADG at Maxminimus, I decided that I needed to start a collection of my own.  I diligently scoured the pages on eBay and finally decided on 2 prints dating in the late 1870's that needed a home in Texas.  I paid roughly $28 plus shipping from Germany for each print, which I now know was overpayment by about $10.  After patiently waiting for their arrival for about 2 weeks from Germany, they finally showed up yesterday.  And, after removing the prints from their carefully packaged shipping box, I was very happy. They are very cool indeed and just what I hoped for as a start to my collection.  And yes, Jen thinks they are pretty cool also.

So here they are...along with a picture of Mrs. S's Valentine roses:

My prints are caricatures of the following:

Top:  Published November 1, 1879 - Montagu Stephen Williams (1835-1892), barrister, magistrate and author.

Bottom:  Published June 29, 1878 - George Sackville Frederick Lane Fox, JP for West Riding of Yorks, Vice-Chancellor of the Primrose League; born Boston Spa, Yks, 9 Nov 1838; educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford (M.A.);

Now some of you are asking, "What in the heck are Vanity Fair Caricatures?"  So I'll explain.

Vanity Fair was a British weekly magazine published from 1868 to 1914.  Subtitled "A Weekly Show of Political, Social and Literary Wares", it was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles, who aimed to expose the contemporary vanities of Victorian society. The first issue appeared in London on November 7, 1868. It offered its readership articles on fashion, current events, the theatre, books, social events and the latest scandals, together with serial fiction, word games and other trivia.

A full-page, color lithograph of a contemporary celebrity or dignitary appeared in most issues, and it is for these caricatures that Vanity Fair is best known today. Subjects included artists, athletes, royalty, statesmen, scientists, authors, actors, soldiers, religious personalities, businesspeople and scholars. More than two thousand of these images appeared, and they are considered the chief cultural legacy of the magazine, forming a pictorial record of the period. They were produced by an international group of artists, including Max Beerbolm, Sir Leslie Ward (who signed his work "Spy"), the Italians Carlo Pellegrini ("Singe" and "Ape"), Melchiorre Delfico ("Delfico") and Liborio Prosperi ("Lib"), the French artist James Jacques Tissot (Coïdé), and the American Thomas Nast.

The caricatures that I purchased were created by Sir Leslie Ward, who drew 1,325 cartoons for Vanity Fair between 1873 and 1911.  Here is a photo and self-caricature of Ward.