George Montbard (1841–1905)
Watercolour caricature of Charles Darwin in the ‘Gallery of Ancestors’
England?, ca 1871

This unremarked caricature of Darwin in the ‘Gallery of Ancestors’ by the French refugee artist George Montbard recently came to light in the University Library’s Darwin Archive. Montbard was the pseudonym of Charles Auguste Loye, a French artist who fled to England in 1871, the same year in which Darwin published Descent of man, to which the caricature clearly refers. In the style of periodicals such as Vanity Fair, the caricature appears never to have been published and it is not known how it arrived in Darwin’s collection.

MS DAR 225: 178