Conversation and Evening Walk North Inch Perch William Kay coloured etching 1794

KAY, William. Conversation. And Evening Walk on the North Inch Perth 1794. 
 
Hand-coloured etching, image approximately 250 x 180 mm, signed in the plate at lower left, with the smaller initials "W.K." immediately beneath. The print has been laid onto card and subsequently mounted onto a further card support. Some age-toning and light surface marking, but the impression and contemporary colouring is particularly attractive.
 
A scarce late eighteenth-century Scottish social caricature depicting the fashionable evening promenade on the North Inch at Perth. Military officers, civilians, clergy and elegantly dressed women are taking a stroll across the golf course.
 
The artist is William Kay, a little-recorded Scottish caricaturist active in the late eighteenth century. The National Portrait Gallery holds another signed work by him, The Social Pinch of 1789, also catalogued as an etching and bearing the same distinctive signature. His surviving work appears to be extremely scarce.
 
The subject has a connection with the early history of Scottish golf. The North Inch at Perth was already a long-established golfing ground before the formation of the Royal Perth Golfing Society in 1824. This exact composition was reproduced in T. D. Miller's History of the Royal Perth Golfing Society (1935), where it illustrates the North Inch in 1794. Miller describes the contemporary custom by which Perth's upper classes promenaded along the bank of the Tay while golf was played across the centre of the Inch.
 
The print therefore provides an early image of one of Scotland's historic golfing grounds, some thirty years before the formal establishment of the Royal Perth Golfing Society. A scarce item.