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John Kay: A Series of Original Portraits and Etchings

A Scottish master of caricature

Alan Bell
Birlinn, Edinburgh, 976pp, £200,

Bevis Hillier

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Bevis Hiller on a new collection of John Kay's artworks

My feeling about modern art has been less distaste than despair. I think it was that feeling of cultural exile that caused me to write, in 1970, a book on Cartoons and Caricatures. Though it is on record that W. H. Auden liked it, it is not a favourite of mine among my 30 books. I tackled the subject too much head-on, simply tracing the history of that art-form from Greek vase-painting, via the nasty caricature of Isaac of Norwich and other Jews on a Rotulus Judeorum of 1133, through to the living luminaries. I wish that instead I had taken themes — religion, war, sex, fashion and so on — and illustrated how different satirists, in different centuries, had dealt with them.

One benefit of the approach I took was that the minor masters did not get missed out. In covering the 18th century, I did not just show the marvellous virtuoso work of Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson; I also gave houseroom to three lesser figures: the Englishmen Henry William Bunbury and John Collier (‘Tim Bobbin’) and the Scot John Kay. They came from three different strata of society: respectively, the upper, middle and working classes. Bunbury was the son of a baronet. The Derby was named the Derby on the toss of a coin: if the Earl of Derby had lost, the race would have been known as the Bunbury — a name nicked by Wilde for the malade imaginaire in The Importance of Being Earnest. Collier, born near Manchester, was the son of a parson-schoolmaster. John Kay’s father was a stonemason.

In 1970 I wrote:

Bunbury … was a friend of Goldsmith, Garrick and Reynolds, and a favourite of the Duke and Duchess of York, to whom he was appointed equerry in 1787. He made the Grand Tour in France and Italy and studied drawing in Rome — although one would hardly guess it from the bucolic crudity of his pictorial style.

I added:

If Bunbury, with all his chances to see the masterpieces of Italian art, never rose above a rough-and-ready hacks’ style, we cannot expect from contemporary self-made caricaturists more than a tempered primitivism. John Kay and ‘Tim Bobbin’ were both primitives, in that their style had that simple, mystic, John Clare quality which comes of self-education within limited horizons, yet both were capable of greater subtlety than Bunbury.

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