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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

Fair Burnett strikes the adoring eye,

Heaven’s beauties on my fancy shine…

In a plate whimsically entitled ‘The Sapient Septemvirii: King’s College, Aberdeen’, Kay depicted the Church of Scotland minister and university professor Alexander Gerard (1728-95). In 1759 Gerard was awarded a gold medal by the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture for a significant Essay on Taste. Neither the Kay book nor the Dictionary of National Biography mentions that, in the competition, Gerard beat the painter Allan Ramsay, who knew a thing or two about taste.

Libraries which invest in these handsome volumes will be giving everyone a treat, not just historians of 18th-century Scotland. I have only one minor complaint: Alan Bell’s introduction (but not the rest of the text) is printed in a very faint type. In Anthony Powell’s novel Hearing Secret Harmonies, the effete theatre director Norman Chandler, asked about his suit-material, says: ‘The colour’s named Pale Galilean.’ That would be an apt name for the printing of this book’s intro. As Humphrey Bogart says, confronting a villain: ‘It’s not you I dislike. I just don’t like your type.’

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