Kay (John)

a social satire of a local pressure group who, in 1786, campaigned to better connect the Lawnmarket area of Edinburgh where they lived, to Princes Street. The scene depicts the wives of the committee being taken by carriage over the new mud causeway to Dunn’s Hotel, the base of the subscription campaign, to spend the surplus funds on a celebration dinner. The carriage is drawn by six local tradesmen instead of horses, and the driver is one George Boyd, who helped lead the campaign. 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 engraving with aquatint on wove paper, 145 x 200 mm. (5 3/4 x 8 in), signed and dated 1786 in the plate, [BM Satires 7024],