What the barber saw
The Edinburgh of John Kay

Walking down the High Street of Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival a myriad of sights and sounds besets the senses: the enthusiastic voices of thespians alongside the ticket touts calling out to passers-by, the aroma of coffee from pavement cafés, the friendly jostling with strangers while threading one’s way down the street, are all part of the festival frolics in the capital’s Old Town.

John Kay, the Edinburgh miniaturist and caricaturist who lived at 227 High Street, would have had a splendid view from his window of such a spectacle. Indeed, given his penchant for drawing likenesses and recording local events, he would have relished such a scene.

Kay first worked as a barber in the Old Town, an occupation associated with news and gossip, but as his widow confessed, ‘he cared for, and could settle at no employment, except that of etching likenesses’. With the help of a patron’s annuity, Kay was able to give up barbering for his art and over a period of fifty years this self-taught artist produced some nine hundred etchings, of which less than half survive today.

Edinburgh at the end of the eighteenth century provided a plethora of suitable subjects for Kay’s burin, from the ‘brilliant constellation of philosophers, historians and critics’ to the legal and medical professions; from tradesmen to street sellers and the many visitors who made their way up the High Street and into the bustle of Parliament Square.

Kay could look out of his window either at home on the High Street or in his print shop in Parliament Close and view at close range the seething panorama of Edinburgh citizenry who lived and worked side by side within the dense confines of the medieval city. Edinburgh was a city in transition and the building of the New Town would soon deliver privacy for wealthy professionals and lure them away from the bawdy company of the Old Town.

In 1839 The Edinburgh Courant described Kay’s great social document thus:
‘The work is really one of which Edinburgh ought to be proud.’ Rarely has a city nurtured such a great social commentator. Indeed, in the Original Portraits first published by Hugh Paton in 1837, ‘hardly a citizen of any consideration, or in short any individual whatever, conspicuous for public spirit, eccentricity, or personal peculiarity of any kind, escaped the penetrating eye of honest John Kay’.

Perhaps somewhere in this great city another artist is recording a similar series of portraits and local events for a future generation. If so, we will be richer for it.

Capital Caricatures, A Selection of Etchings by John Kay by Sheila Szatkowski will be published at the same time as the limited edition, John Kay's Original Portraits, a collection of 356 etchings and accompanying text, originally published in two volumes in 1837–8.