Mortimer Menpes

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Mortimer Menpes in a wash by William Walker Hodgson dated 26 January 1892

Arthur Conan Doyle by Mortimer Menpes

Menpes' Portrait of Savant after Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar

Menpes' Warehouses from The Grey River (1899)

Menpes' Street in Venice

Mortimer Luddington Menpes (22 February 1855 Port Adelaide, South Australia - 1 April 1938 Pangbourne), was a war artist and engraver, author, printmaker and illustrator.

Menpes was born at Port Adelaide on 22 February 1855, the second son of property developer James Menpes, who with his wife, Ann, had settled in Australia in 1839.

Educated at a private school, he attended classes at the Adelaide school of design, but his formal art training began at the South Kensington School of Art in 1878, after his family had moved back to England in 1875. Edward Poynter was a fellow student at the school. Menpes first exhibited at a Royal Academy exhibition in 1880. Over the following 20 years 35 of his paintings and etchings appeared at the Academy.

He set off on a sketching tour of Brittany in 1880 and thereby met James McNeill Whistler, becoming his pupil and at one stage sharing a flat with him at Cheyne Walk on the Embankment in London. Here he was taught etching by Whistler, whose influence, together with that of Japanese design, is evident in his later work.

His 1887 trip to Japan led to his first one-man exhibition at Dowdeswell's Gallery (1878-1912) in London. Menpes bought a property at 25 Cadogan Gardens in Sloane Square in 1888 and decorated it in the Japanese style. Whistler and Menpes quarreled in 1888 over the interior design of the house, which Whistler felt was a brazen copying of his own ideas. The house was sold in 1900, and Menpes retired to Kent.

In 1900, after the outbreak of the Boer War, Menpes was sent to South Africa as a war artist for the weekly Black and White. With the war's end in 1902 he travelled widely, visiting Burma, Egypt, France, India, Italy, Japan, Kashmir, Mexico, Morocco, and Spain and producing illustrated books of those countries.

He married Rosa Mary Grosse in London in 1875. She too, was from Australia and died 23 August 1936. They produced a son, Mortimer James (b. 1879) and two daughters, Rose Maud Goodwin and Dorothy Whistler. Dorothy, Whistler's godchild, married a Mr. Flower and died in Minehead in July 1973 aged 89.

For the last 30 years of his life, Menpes retired to Iris Court, Pangbourne from where he managed his Purley-on-Thames business, "Menpes Fruit Farms". He built 40 large greenhouses in which to grow carnations and 8 cottages to accommodate the farm workers.

[edit] Memberships

Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1881)
Royal Society of British Artists (1885)
Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1897)
Royal Institute of Oil Painters (1899)

[edit] Publications

War Impressions (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1901)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
Japan: A Record in Colour (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1901)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
World Pictures (1902)
World's Children (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1903)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
The Durbar (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1903)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
Venice (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1904) (Text by Dorothy Menpes)
Whistler as I Knew Him (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1904)
Brittany (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1905)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
Rembrandt (1905)
India (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1905)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
Thames ((London: Adam & Charles Black, 1906)(Text by G E Mitton)
Sir Henry Irving (1906)
Paris (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1909)(Text by Dorothy Menpes)
Portrait Biographies of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener

Menpes' daughter Dorothy wrote the text for almost all of the above titles. He developed a special form of colour etching, used to illustrate his books and founded the Menpes Press of London and Watford. From 1900 he printed a large number of reproductions of Old Masters, using his colouring process, and donated a substantial number of these to form the nucleus of a proposed Commonwealth Art Gallery of Australia. Instead, the paintings ended up on the walls of the National Library of Australia.