WD494-497

MOFFAT, JAMES (1775-1815)

Moffat was a Scotsman who arrived in India aged only 14, living in Calcutta from 1789 to 1815. He appears to have learnt his profession of drawing and engraving in India. According to Wynyard Wilkinson (‘The Makers of Indian Colonial Silver’, London, 1987, p. 137) he was apprenticed as an engraver to the silversmith John Ludvig Jacobi in 1789, and then worked from 1794-1804 for another silversmith John Mair and his successor firms, while engraving and publishing his own views. An advertisement in the ‘Calcutta Gazette’ in 1797 offering to produce ‘Picturesque copper-plate engravings’ led to a series of views of Calcutta and its environs. Many show buildings seen across the River Hoogly, rendered with economy and a feel for the geometry of composition. From 1804 he seems to have set up on his own. In 1798 and from 1805 to 1810 he produced sets of views of towns on the Ganges and Hooghly, and in 1808 engravings from Henry Creighton's drawings of Gaur. For Moffat’s prints, see P107-113, P118-323 etc. The water-colour of Government House, Calcutta (WD476), previously attributed to him, is more likely to have been worked up in the studio of Edward Orme, ‘q.v.’

---------------------

WD494-497

4 caricatures. Purchased 19 October 1914.

Note: The inscriptions on WD495-7 state that they were published by James Moffat in Calcutta in 1796 and 1798. No trace of this publication has so far been found. WD496, however, is the original for one of a series in similar style published as aquatints in England between 1811 and 1813 by William Holland of 11 Cockspur Street, the title adding 'Of Mr. Holland may be had a number of East and West India Caricatures'. The published drawing is lettered: ‘Scene in the Writer's Buildings Calcutta!’