Kay (John)

depicting the actor, Charles Lee Lewes and his wife in costume performing on the stage in Edinburgh in 1792. Lee Lewes (1740-1803) had achieved success on the stage at Covent Garden before moving to Drury Lane in 1783. But, in 1787, he moved to Edinburgh and from 1792 helped manage the Dundee Repertory Theatre. His career waned after he moved to Dublin the following year. From the posthumously published ‘A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the Late John Kay, Miniature Painter, Edinburgh’.

John Kay (1742-1826) was born in Dalkeith where he became apprenticed to a barber at the age of 13. He moved to Edinburgh as a young man in the 1760s, still plying his trade as a member of the corporation of barber-surgeons. But, in 1784, he produced his first etching and was soon encouraged to convert his premises to a print shop, such was the popularity of his caricatures and portraits of local characters and figures of the day. The first published collection, gathered together by the Edinburgh publisher, Hugh Paton, didn’t appear until over a decade after Kay’s death, in 1838, with subsequent re-issues in 1842 and 1877, before the printing plates were formally destroyed,

hand-coloured stipple-engraving with aquatint on wove paper, 200 x 125 mm. (8 x 5 in), signed and dated 1792 in the plate,