Career
From 1765 to 1768 he was an occasional exhibitor at the Society of Artists, and twice sent pictures to the Royal Academy. In 1768 he obtained a premium from the Society of Arts for a new method of setting crayon drawings. About 1770 Keyse opened a tea-garden in Bermondsey, then a suburb of London, where a chalybeate spring had been found, and which became known as the Bermondsey Spa.
Here, with other attractions, Keyse kept a permanent exhibition of his own drawings.
Obtaining a music license, he made the gardens an imitation of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, open in the evening during the summer months, and provided fireworks, including a set-piece of the siege of Gibraltar, constructed and designed by Keyse himself. Keyse died at his gardens 8 February 1800, in his seventy-ninth year.
The gardens remained open for about five years longer, and gave their name to the Spa Road, Bermondsey.