Joseph Edgar Boehm with a bust of John Ruskin

Leslie Matthew Ward ( 1851-1922) used the pen name of Spy for his drawings for the magazine Vanity Fair. His work was usually very symapathetic tot he sitter to the extent that The Daily News accused the famous portraits of Vanity Fair as not being caricatures at all. The editor Thomas Gibson Bowles (1842-1922) argued that they were exaggerations created for no specific purpose.

Another influential writer John Ruskin believed that satire and caricature should be used to highlight the social inequalities in nineteenth-century Britain rather than as an end in itself to provoke amusement. Here he is represented as a bust being modelled by Joseph Edgar Boehm, sculptor to the Crown.