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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

For anybody looking through the volumes, there are two joys: the drawings and the commentary. Alan Bell, who knows his 18th-century Edinburgh, contributes an acute biographical and critical introduction, in which he nicely describes the etchings as ‘highly formalised and lying at ease on the border between portrayal and caricature’. There is a naivety about them, but Kay’s contemporaries agreed that they were excellent likenesses of their subjects — one cannot say ‘sitters’, as few people actually posed for him; he observed and sketched them on the hoof. ‘Quaint’ is an adjective twice applied to Kay’s etchings by the Dictionary of National Biography; and certainly he revelled in eccentricity and the grotesque; but his fastidious homespun line conveys intimacy in a way that a gallery oil painting might not. It is the equivalent, in art, of someone like Barbara Pym in literature.

The aim of the commentary writers seems to have been to extract the maximum of entertainment out of each character. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-99), the judge and philosopher, is thought by some to have anticipated the theories of Darwin; but this is how he is treated in the Kay book:

He was not a little remarkable for … the strangeness and oddity of some of his opinions and sentiments. The most remarkable of these, as recorded by himself in his celebrated work on the Origin and Progress of Language, is the assertion that ‘the human race were originally gifted with tails’! It was an allusion to this extraordinary discovery, that Lord Kames, to whom he would on a certain occasion have conceded precedence, declined it, saying, ‘By no means, my lord, you must walk first that I may see your tail!’

One of Kay’s caricatures shows Monboddo with the judge and author Lord Kames (1696-1782), but the commentary misses the best Kames story: how in 1780 he greeted a verdict against Matthew Hay, an old chess partner found guilty of murder, with the quip: ‘That’s checkmate to you, Matthew!’ In the same etching is Hugo Arnot (1749-86), author of the satirical Essay on Nothing (1776). Kay again caricatured Monboddo in 1799, the last year of the judge’s long life. The accompanying text records how Monboddo ‘and his lovely daughter’ had patronised Burns when the poet ‘arrived from the plough in Ayrshire’, and how Burns had celebrated the girl’s beauty in the stanza beginning

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