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NLA News - home August 2002 Volume XII Number 11
The Great Masters, by Mortimer Menpes
Portrait of a Woman of Eighty Three by Mortimer Menpes
Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938)
Portrait of a Woman of Eighty Three
between 1900 and 1905
shellac on oil on cardboard; oval image
40.0 x 31.5 cm
Pictorial Collection S4537
after Harmensz van Rijn REMBRANDT
(1606?–1669) Dutch
Portrait of Aechje Claesdr. Pesser
oil on oak; 71.1 x 55.9 cm
National Gallery, London

Tim Fisher introduces the National Library’s current exhibition

In June 1911 the Australian-born, British artist, Mortimer Menpes presented 38 oil-paint copies of ‘The Great Masters’ of European art to the Commonwealth Government. The pictures were intended ‘to form the nucleus of a Commonwealth art gallery’. In his message of thanks to Menpes, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher wrote that the paintings would be

cordially appreciated in Australia, where, in the nature of things, the majority of the citizens can never have a chance of seeing the originals … It is a great pleasure to me to be the medium through which your fine gift comes to the people of Australia, for it is one of the particular objects of the Australian democracy to foster art in all its branches and to give to all people the opportunity of the widest education.

The paintings, however, were only shown upon on one occasion, when the Federal Government toured a reduced selection to Holbrook, Gundagai, Murrumburrah and Young, during 1945. Entitled The Mortimer Menpes Collection of Reproductions of the Great Masters, this was among the first exhibitions to be organised by an Australian Commonwealth Government (under the auspices of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales).

For many years these curious paintings have hung in the corridor outside the Pictorial Collection Reading Room at the National Library of Australia. Largely unnoticed, the paintings are now 100 years old and have survived in good condition and in their original frames. The Library’s present exhibition, The Great Masters, by Mortimer Menpes, presents the opportunity to not only show the paintings, but also to delve a little into their history.

Mortimer Menpes was born at Port Adelaide in 1855, the second son of James Menpes, a self-made property developer who had emigrated with his wife, Ann, to Adelaide in 1839. Mortimer began his training at the School of Design in Adelaide, before his family moved back to England in 1875, where he completed his study at the National Art Training School, London in 1880. In January 1880 the British press was full of laudatory accounts of the gift to the British Museum of a series of etched portraits by Mortimer Menpes, their subjects carefully chosen from all walks of life. Barely out of art school the young artist was already recognised (and publicised) as a prolific and gifted draughtsman and printmaker, who before the end of the year would also be selected to hang in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

It was as a protégé and acolyte of ‘The Master’, James McNeill Whistler, however, that Menpes first gained popular recognition. Whistler not only introduced him to the activities of the British avant-garde but also treated the avid young artist, fresh from Australia, as a personal dogsbody. Their relationship continued for eight years, until Menpes’ hugely successful exhibition of Japanese pictures held at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1888. Seeing the exhibition, Whistler flew into a rage, accused Menpes of plagiarism (‘ "Sir," he said, "your conduct savours of the police court’) and marched out of the gallery, immediately severing their friendship. 

Portrait of William II, Prince of Orange by Mortimer Menpes
Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938)
Portrait of William II, Prince of Orange
between 1900 and 1909
shellac on oil on cardboard;
45.5 x 37.5 cm
Pictorial Collection S4541
after Antonis VAN DYCK
(1599–1641) Belgian
Portrait of William II, Prince of Orange c.1640s
At time of copying original was in
the State of Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg, Russia

It must be said that Menpes did model his own art (and exhibition design) extremely closely on Whistler’s, almost to the point of mimicry. It seems that as a student, Menpes’ work had been a reflection of his master’s brilliance; as a competitor he was (in Whistler’s own view, as recorded in his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) ‘an Australian immigrant of Fulham—who, like the Kangaroo of his country, is born with a pocket and puts everything into it.’ For his part, Menpes was blithely unrepentant, seemingly relieved to be rid of Whistler’s burdensome demands and domination. 

As a mature artist, Menpes was undoubtedly a major figure in the printmaking revival that swept British art during the late nineteenth century. From 1880 to 1914, he produced over 700 different etchings and drypoints, invariably printed by the artist himself on carefully selected antique papers. He was also widely credited with leading the revival of colour etching. Perhaps his most lasting accomplishments, however, were in the field of British Japonaiserie. Although many artists in Britain gained inspiration from Japanese art, Menpes was one of the first to visit Japan, in 1887, and one of the very few painters to seek instruction from a Japanese artist, the master painter and printmaker Kyosai. 

Most importantly, Menpes’ sympathetic understanding of Japanese art and culture formed his philosophical commitment to the idea of a ‘living art’. Directly opposed to Whistler’s dictum that art is for art’s sake, and perhaps originating in his Australian childhood, this egalitarian notion held that art was not ‘the privilege of class’ (as he believed was the case in Britain) but rather ‘the rightful inheritance of the many’. For Menpes, the universal appreciation of beauty and craftsmanship, demonstrated to him by the Japanese people, epitomised this living ideal.

Perhaps the most concrete manifestation of this philosophy was his famously beautiful Japanese house at 25 Cadogan Gardens, London—designed by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and opened in July 1899. Menpes had spent eight months in Japan during 1897, designing and commissioning the entire interior decoration. The full project ‘required the creation of a vast array of practical and decorative objects and furnishings in a wide variety of materials including wood, bronze, cloisonné, porcelain, textiles and lacquer’. All these decorative elements were bound by the overall aesthetic plan of organic growth, each room devoted to a different floral emblem. This ‘authentic’ Japanese interior was conceived, designed and carried out by Menpes with the aid of over 70 individual craftsmen.

The aesthetically democratic belief that all people could develop an ‘instinctive love of the beautiful’ fundamentally influenced the way Menpes lived and worked as an artist. His paintings were almost always small and reasonably priced, and he often reproduced his paintings as etchings or drypoints, sold singly or in sets. Eventually he began reproducing his paintings in a series of books, with bound-in etchings printed by his own press. The desire to make his own art more widely available, combined with his extraordinary facility to reproduce the work of others, both in paint and ink, also led Menpes into a successful commercial publishing career as author, colour illustrator and printer of numerous travel books, biographies and the new genre of colour-illustrated artists monographs. Largely published by A&C Black between 1900 and 1914, most of these books were linked to solo exhibitions of the original ‘artworks’, and the period marks the height of his visibility as an artist.

The philosophy behind these publications reflects the late Victorian aspiration to combine making money with a type of pedagogic, British ‘arts and crafts’, cultural egalitarianism. Although motivated by the domestic market for a taste of the exotic (War Impressions 1901, Japan: A Record in Colour 1902, World Pictures 1902, The Durbar 1903) Menpes constantly reinforced the dignity of the ‘common’ approach by concentrating upon everyday subjects such as children, street scenes, shopfronts and people at work. However, Menpes’ move into the new three-colour, half–tone ‘Hentschel Colourtype Process’ (a photographic colour printing technique), combined with his publisher’s drive for profits, led them both down less ethically sound avenues—the commercial reproduction of Menpes’ copies of other artists’ work masquerading as the originals. 

Portrait of Savant by Mortimer Menpes
Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938)
Portrait of Savant
between 1900 and 1905
shellac on oil on cardboard;
41.7 x 36.5 cm
Pictorial Collection S4518
after Harmensz van Rijn REMBRANDT
(1606?–1669) Dutch
Portrait of a Scholar 1631
oil on oak; 104.5 x 92.0 cm
State Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg, Russia

From 1900 onwards, both A&C Black and Menpes’ publications, and public statements, purposefully obfuscate the meanings of colour etchings versus (photographic) colour reproduction, works of art as opposed to ‘artworks’, copies made for reproduction and fakes. Menpes is noteworthy for his ability to synthesise and bring to a state of completion the ideas of others, however his populist books on Rembrandt and Gainsborough tread a very fine line between creating a new genre of educative art history books and forgery. While purporting to be educating the public by ‘always keeping in view the purest of ideals in art, the union between originality of intention and perfection of craftsmanship’, Menpes was in fact copying and publishing other artists’ work for profit.

In this regard, Menpes is very much of his time—he had for many years, along with others, shown a keen academic interest in making etched replicas of the works of other artists. In 1889 he had displayed a large drypoint copy of Frans Hals’ Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St Adrian at the Royal Academy, and his 1898 exhibition of coloured etchings included reproductions of paintings by Rembrandt, Romney and Piero della Francesca. However, the ethical difference between making illustrative engravings after existing works (a technique used widely by the illustrated magazines of the period) and commercially publishing photographic reproductions of his own oil-painted copies as representing the original, does not seem to have occurred to him. This is puzzling, because well before 1906, when Menpes and A&C Black began discussing their latest project—‘The Menpes Series of Great Masters’, a series of 100 reproductions of famous paintings—Menpes’ friend and confidant the journalist M.H. Spielmann had written an extensive series of articles entitled ‘Art Forgeries and Counterfeits: A General Survey’ for The Magazine of Art. Article number six (1904) is even subtitled: ‘Pictures—"Old Masters" ’and appears in the same volume as an article about Menpes’ fashionable portraiture practice.

Nonetheless, ‘The Menpes Series of Great Masters’ went ahead, advertised as colour reproductions of the Great Masters made under the artist’s direct supervision, but actually consisting of three-colour, half-tone, varnished photographic prints of Menpes’ oil-paint copies of old master paintings, many of which he had already produced for the Rembrandt and Gainsborough books. It is not clear in fact, from the available documentation, that all the 100 oil copies or the ‘reproductions’ were ever actually produced. Both the artist and the publisher appear to have had second thoughts. Possible criticism of the scheme was even discussed, with A&C Black promising Menpes they would ‘stand on either hand to meet any foe’. When the oil-paint copies were finally exhibited at Bruton Galleries, London, even the critics were not sure what they were looking at.

‘The Menpes Series of Great Masters’ was finally rather damaging to Menpes’ career, both as an artistic exercise and as a publication. After three years work on the series the initial critical response was favourable, however few of the ‘reproductions’ seem to have been produced, perhaps because the deceptive language of the marketing did not stand up to personal scrutiny of the copies. Menpes was on dangerous ground, as the morés of the time condoned the publication of reproductions of copied works, but did not allow the copies themselves to be offered on the market, particularly if they contained the original artist’s signature—as they were then considered forgeries. Regardless of this, some of the originals were disposed of, as even the reported 50 copies given to the Commonwealth in 1911, actually numbered only 38.

The gift of the Old Master copies to the Commonwealth was most probably more pragmatic than magnanimous, despite being couched in Menpes’ rhetoric about ‘bringing art to the people’. Between 1908 and 1914, Menpes’ art was concentrated exclusively on producing and exhibiting large numbers of etchings. However, his main concern was the fruit farm and carnation nursery he had established at Pangbourne in Berkshire. In 1909 he not only sold his large Japanese house in Cadogan Gardens, and moved to the modest farmhouse called ‘Iris Court’, but also disposed of his commercial presses and all copyrights to A&C Black. It is clear that the large number of unsaleable and increasingly critically maligned framed oil copies would have been a burden to store. It seems most likely that, with his keen eye for an opportunity, Menpes had recognised that the gifting of the paintings presented an ideal way to dispose of the works outside the marketplace—while still benefiting him with publicity for his patronage, his ‘Thank-offering to my native land’.

Japanese-style interior of Mortimer Menpes' Cadogan Gardens house, London
Japanese-style interior of Mortimer Menpes' Cadogan Gardens house, London
Reproduced from 'Mr Mortimer Menpes' House: An Experient in the Application of Japanese Ornament to the Decoration of an English House', The Studio, vol. 17, p. 174
(London: The Studio, 1899)

As can be seen by Prime Minister Fisher’s enthusiastic response, Menpes’ belief in the uplifting benefits of social improvement through culture (even if only by reproduction) were curiously matched by conservative opinion and emerging public arts policy in Australia. The notion that plastercast copies of great works of art are just as rewarding and educational as the originals characterises many of the early Australian Federal Government forays into fine art and culture, and also lay behind the establishment of several late nineteenth century public galleries and libraries. If, as was widely thought, the newly established nation did not have a substantial high culture, then it was up to the Federal Government to create or import one.

The year of Menpes’ gift, 1911, also marks the year the Historic Memorials Committee was formed. This parliamentary committee then commissioned the Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board (the direct precursor of the National Gallery of Australia), largely to oversee the commissioning of official portraits. As well as formulating arts policy, both of these bodies had been created, in part, to distance the often-acrimonious debates about the Federal Government’s role in cultural matters from the prime minister. (For instance, the long and difficult negotiations surrounding the Commonwealth acquisition of the huge Petherick Collection—seen as forming the basis of a future Commonwealth Library—were only finally concluded in 1911, by the endorsement of the Petherick Bill by Parliament.) The inimitable Menpes, who had previously corresponded personally with Edmund Barton, preferred to make his offer direct to the prime minister.

The ambivalence surrounding the making of the great master copies was reflected in the fate of the collection. Practically all official documentation regarding the gift between 1911 and 1944 has disappeared. The collection was neither mentioned nor listed in the copious records on Commonwealth Government works of art transferred to Canberra from Melbourne in 1926. Similarly, it is absent from the early files of the Historic Memorials Committee. The collection’s brief and rather haphazard reappearance in the touring show of 1945 only heralded another 50 years of near-invisibility.

The National Library’s present exhibition recognises that in the history of Australia’s visual culture the Mortimer Menpes gift was the first ‘Old Master’ touring exhibition to visit our shores. It was one of the first formal recognitions by the Federal Government that high European culture was also ‘our’ high culture—endorsing an implicit (and persistent) belief that real culture only existed in Europe.

TIM FISHER is Exhibitions Curator at the National Library

The Great Masters, by Mortimer Menpes
runs at the National Library of Australia
from 25 July to 7 October
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