The head of surgeon Sir Henry Thompson appears between Leighton and the Countess. Frith himself appears in the centre of the painting, bare-headed and whiskered, directly below the painting of Disraeli, talking to two women behind the seat. One of the two women on the other side of the seat, facing away from Leighton, is the heiress and philanthropist Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Having remained a spinster until she was sixty-six, Baroness Burdett-Coutts provoked a scandal in 1881 by marrying her much younger secretary, the American William Ashmead-Bartlett, who became Mr Burdett-Coutts. Baroness Burdett-Coutts is shown in conversation with the younger Lady Diana Huddleston, daughter of William Beauclerk, 9th Duke of St Albans. Their husbands also appear among the standing figures behind the seat. Lady Diana's husband was Sir John Walter Huddleston, the last Baron of the Exchequer and a judge of Queen's Bench. He wears a top hat, and stands just behind and to the left of poet and playwright Robert Browning, the bare-headed and white-bearded figure seen talking to an unknown woman in a green dress. To the right, listening to Browning's conversation, is naturalist Thomas Huxley (probably included due to his trenchant support for Charles Darwin, who had died in 1882). Mr Burdett-Coutts stands behind and to the right of Huxley, reading, with moustache and top hat. At the left of the painting stands the "homely figure" of Anthony Trollope (who died on 6 December 1882), with full white beard and top hat, noting in a book as he gazes at an "aesthetic" family in the foreground to the right, comprising a woman in green with sunflower buttonhole gazing at the artworks (a professional model, Jenny Trip), a woman in yellow reading her catalogue, and a girl in orange looking up at her. Frith describes them as "a family of pure aesthetes absorbed in affected study of the pictures" with Trollope affording "a striking contrast to the eccentric forms near him." Cartoonist George du Maurier, with moustache and hat, stands immediately behind; to the left, behind him, hatless, is illustrator John Tenniel. Further left, between Trollope and the edge of the painting, are novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon and musician Sir Julius Benedict. To the right behind Trollope are a group of four politicians – the right-most, the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, faces a bearded Sir Henry Stafford Northcote; the tall hatless man behind Gladstone is Home Secretary Sir