Capital Caricatures: A Selection of Etchings by John Kay by Sheila Szatkowski Birlinn, Gbp9.99

Summary

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JOHN Kay, who was born in Dalkeith in 1742, was an Edinburgh barber who metamorphosed into a Scottish equivalent of the English caricaturists Gillray and Rowlandson. But as Sheila Szatkowski wisely acknowledges in this wholly delightful and endlessly fascinating selection of his etchings, Kay was never as savage as Gillray or as sarcastic as Rowlandson.

His art was altogether more subtle, born more often than not out of fondness rather than of a desire to hold his subjects up to ridicule. He was not, of course, oblivious to faults and foibles, but even when drawing the most criminal of people - Deacon Brodie being a case in point - he always seemed to err on the side of sympathy. Being human, Kay understood, was to be continually assailed by the possibility of falling from grace and into failure.

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Extract

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Capital Caricatures: A Selection of Etchings by John Kay by Sheila Szatkowski Birlinn, Gbp9.99

He was drawing at a time when Scotland, and Edinburgh in particular, was in a state of intellectual ferment, which it had never hitherto achieved and has never since come remotely close to reprising. If ever there was a time one would have wished to have been alive, surely this was it. Edinburgh in the late 18th century was indisputably a place in which philosophical and scientific learning was in the ascendant. The one rubbed off against the other, producing a tumult of ideas and questioning. This, then, as American historian Arthur Herman has intimated, was the city in which the modern world was forged, where everyo...

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