Dr Olivia Ferguson (IASH Fellow): John Kay: A New View of Caricature
The portraits of John Kay (1742-1826) occupy a marginal position in the study of satire and caricature by print historians and literary critics. Yet unique among graphic satirists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, copies of Kay’s prints even now decorate the walls of pubs and cafés in the city whose street life and celebrities he represented. Supported by an annuity from an aristocratic patron, Kay drew and etched over nine hundred portraits of Edinburgh’s lawyers, philosophers, merchants, shopkeepers, and soldiers. This talk will suggest why Kay has been left out of scholarly accounts of Britain’s so-called ‘golden age of caricature’, and will move on to define Kay’s importance to research on caricature as a set of interrelated historical practices. As Kay’s oeuvre demonstrates, graphic caricature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain could promise accuracy and authenticity even while it threatened distortion and denigration, and in this it supplemented and reinvigorated longstanding forms of prosopography. There are reproductions of Kay’s prints throughout the IASH building, and I will focus my analysis on these as examples of Kay’s approaches to portraiture.