British Painter, 1855-1939 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. His book on the Delhi Darbar of illustrated Curzon's grand spectacle of 1903. 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.  Related Paintings of Mortimer Menpes :. | Portrait of Lady | Detail of The Virgin Mary and angel predictor,Saint | Hoar-Frost on the Ice (nn02 | The woman wearing a hat | Portrait of King Louis XV |
Related Artists:
Hippolyte Sebron
(1801-1879 ) - Painter
Philip Wilson Steer
English Painter, 1860-1942 was an English artist. Philip Wilson Steer was born in Birkenhead, the son of the portrait painter Philip Steer (1810-1871). After finding the examinations of the Civil Service too demanding, he became an artist in 1878. He studied at the Gloucester School of Art and then from 1880 to 1881 at the South Kensington Drawing Schools. He was rejected by the Royal Academy of Art and so studied in Paris between 1882 and 1884. He studied at the Acad??mie Julian, and then in the École des Beaux Arts under Cabanel. There he became one of the few English Impressionists. He is known for his landscapes, such as 'The Beach at Walberswick' (1890; Tate Gallery, London). He became a leader (with Walter Sickert) of the English Impressionist movement and was one of the founders of the New English Art Club in 1886. During the First World War, he was recruited by Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Information, to paint pictures of the Royal Navy.
Dirk Valkenburg
(1675, Amsterdam - 1721, Amsterdam), was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to the RKD he was a pupil of Michiel van Musscher, Herman van Vollenhove, and Jan Weenix. In 1698 he worked in Vienna for the Prince of Liechtenstein, and from 1706-1707 he travelled to Surinam to draw the native plants and birds for the wealthy city secretary of Amsterdam, Jonas Witsen, who owned a plantation there and whom he met through his teacher Musscher. He is known for exotic landscapes, paintings of birds, and fruit and flower still lifes.