Mortimer Menpes

Mortimer Menpes (1860–1938) was an Australian painter close to the exiled American James MacNeil Whistler (1834–1903). Whistler was the most admired painter in the English-speaking world at the time, a man who promoted the credo of “art for art’s sake.” Menpes once ran a printing press for Whistler, and shared the older man’s fascination with all things Japanese, often scrimmaging through European markets for special Japanese papers on his behalf. Menpes was very familiar with the printing process. Like Dhurandhar, his images were also used in books like the illustrated volume Darbar (1903) which he co-wrote with his daughter Dorothy. This book included about 100 prints from his paintings, a dozen of which were selected for publicity postcards by the publisher A. & C. Black & Co. of London. Tuck's also produced two series of postcards based on his paintings during his 1902-03 visit to India. Menpes postcards are among the best Western artist-signed postcards of India.