The Art Gallery of New South Wales has recently acquired two oil paintings by Mortimer Menpes (1855-1938) from the Maas Gallery, showing geisha musicians and a Burmese village.
When Australian-born Menpes turned twenty, his family moved back to Britain. After meeting Whistler on a sketching tour in Brittany in 1880, and under his influence, he developed a fascination with all things Japanese. Menpes actually went to Japan in 1887, the first of many travels East. Whistler never did go, and, rather jealously, suggested that Menpes had ‘stolen’ his ideas from him.
In Japan, Menpes discussed the techniques and methods of Japanese art with Japanese artists, and observed and painted scenes of Japanese town-life, customs and rituals. In his book Japan, a Record in Colour (A&C Black, 1901), he later wrote: ‘It is the artist’s ambition that she [a geisha] should be a picture, perfect in every detail, and the geisha is always a picture, beautiful beyond description’. The instrument on the ground in this dramatically lit painting is a shamisen, a three-stringed instrument played with a plectrum. All geisha had to learn to play it.
Burmese Village was painted on a trip to Burma in 1890, was included in his 1891 exhibition at the Dowdeswell Galleries of 121 paintings from his travels. The private view was attended by rank and fashion, from Oscar Wilde to royalty, and was so crowded and stuffy that the papers were reduced to commenting on the visitors and not the paintings: ‘Everyone was there, nothing was seen, and everything was sold’, commented the Pall Mall Gazette (20 April 1891). The galleries were draped with soft pale green silk, the floor had a white carpet, and light was diffused by an awning suspended from the ceiling. The pictures were hung in patterns: ‘the usual rectangular arrangement is done away with... and they are hung in groups that rise and fall obliquely upon the walls’ (Glasgow Herald, 1891). The frames (including this one) were made in Japan, then gilded in London in different tints of gold, green, yellow, or red to suit.
