Piety and Banking, Vanity Fair, 1876

The game’s first star, drawn by Vanity Fair as a banker in 1876.

Work: chromolithograph caricature
Maker: Carlo Pellegrini (“Ape”)
Date: 1876
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: Yale Center for British Art · via Wikimedia Commons
Figure: Arthur Kinnaird — publicity clear

The bank saw a banker. The Cup saw nine finals.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Vanity Fair, 15 January 1876. Carlo Pellegrini draws the Hon. Arthur Fitzgerald Kinnaird for the series on bankers and financiers, under the title Piety and Banking. The magazine saw a young man of the City and the church. Football saw something else: Kinnaird played in nine FA Cup finals, a record that still stands, won five of them, and later served as president of the Football Association for thirty-three years. Some journalists have called him the first football star. The house already holds his 1912 caricature as Lord Kinnaird; this is the same man thirty-six years earlier, drawn for his day job.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Piety and Banking, Vanity Fair, 1876, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Piety and Banking, Vanity Fair, 1876 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of chromolithograph caricature — Carlo Pellegrini (“Ape”), 1876 — from the copy held by Yale Center for British Art · via Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same hand