Mortimer Menpes
1855–1938

Mortimer Menpes was the founding artist of A&C Black’s series of color books, the first of which was published in 1901. It was his proposal for a book called War Impressions, based on his service as an artist for the magazine Black and White during the Boer War, that persuaded Adam Black to launch a project that led to the publication of several hundred lavishly illustrated books over the next two decades. Menpes contributed to more than twenty of these.

Menpes was born in Australia in 1855. In 1875 he moved to London and married the eighteen-year-old Rosa Mary Grosse, who had also been born in Adelaide. By the early 1890s the couple had produced five children, not all of whom survived infancy, and Menpes’s decision to work as a war artist in South Africa at the end of the decade suggests a certain detachment from his close family.

In the 1870s Menpes studied at the South Kensington School of Design, and in 1880 he met James McNeill Whistler, leaving art school to study with him. Menpes’s recollections of his time with Whistler were later published in his 1904 book Whistler as I Knew Him. Menpes was elected to the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers in 1881, and became a member of the Society of British Artists in 1885. In 1886 he was one of the founding members of the New English Art Club. In 1897 he was elected a member of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and in 1899 to the Institute of Oil Painters.

Mortimer Menpes was a man of many parts—artist, engraver, printer, traveler, raconteur, farmer. He made a lasting impact in the fields of etching, printmaking, and color reproduction of paintings. His obituary in the Times summed him up with the words, “Menpes made a much greater impression as a personality that as an artist, being alert, resourceful and opportunist—never at a loss for a retort in argument.” But without his vision and energy, A&C Black’s color books might never have met with the resounding success that they did.

Take a look at some of Mortimer Menpes’s paintings.