Eleanor Lay

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Eleanor Lay, often styled Mrs Lay, was a Brighton publisher and print-seller who ran a fashionable print shop on The Steine in Brighton from about 1788 to 1790. She sold prints from London publishers and also designed and published her own works, including four views of Brighton published in 1788 and dedicated to Mrs Fitzherbert. Her original watercolors are in the Brighton Museum. In 1789 she published two prints by the young Thomas Rowlandson and co-published several others for a Rowlandson drawing book with London publishers Samuel William Fores and John Harris. One of her Rowlandson plates, A Sufferer for Decency, was later acquired by Thomas Tegg and reissued in the 1810s with modified lettering in Caricature Magazine.