Very rare aquatint and etching by the Scottish engraver in Kolkata,James Moffat (1775-1815), with a rare Calcutta imprint. The subject of the print is a somewhat satirical representation or a subtle caricature of domestic vexation and strife surrounding intoxication of a (supposedly) British colonial. The only other known copy of the present print is described as follows in the Yale Lewis Warpole Library catalogue: "In the center of the image a woman, dressed in a short shift, angrily pulls a bottle from the hand of a drunken man. The man sits at an oval drop-leaf table with his right fist raised and a cigar hanging from his mouth as smoke billows around his head. He holds onto a bottle with his left hand, a glass and pile of cigars at his elbow. The woman standing over the table on the left angrily points with her left hand to a clock on the wall which shows the time as 5:05. In the background on the left, a dark-faced, cloaked figure stands before the curtained doorway on the left; the double doors on the right are shut. Also on the table is a lit candle in a glass globe; an overturned pitcher pours onto the floor in the foreground."
Moffat's topographical views of cities, buildings, rivers and other landscape features are rare, while his more satirical domestic scenes are even rarer. Only one other copy of the present print can be traced (in the collection of the Lewis Warpole Library at Yale University). It almost never appears on the market and only twice in historical auction and transaction results (once in 1933 and once in 2020, possibly the present copy).
With two small marginal tears (less than 1 cm), one at the head and one at the foot, neither reaching the plate edge, two small (less than 1 cm) brown patches in the head margin, from former mounts. In very good condition. WorldCat 701812946 (1 copy: Yale); for Moffat's career: H. De Almeida and George H. Gilpin in Indian Renaissance: British Romantic art and the prospect of India (2005), pp. 249-250; C. Smylitopoulos, "Portrait of a nabob: graphic satire, portraiture, and the Anglo-Indian in the late eighteenth century", in: RACAR vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10-25.