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He was deeply impressed by the range of portraits and subject-pictures at the Hermitage Gallery, many of which, by the art of Mr. Mortimer Menpes, have been brought to the fireside of the untravelled; but the Christ at Emmaus revealed to him the heart of Rembrandt, and showed him, once and for all, to what heights a painter may attain when intense feeling is allied with superb craftsmanship.
"He's a war-horse, I tell you, for he'd rather die than run!" "Of course you don't know what fear is," observed Mortimer Menpes. "Ah, yes, I do!" Whistler answered. "I should hate, for example, to be standing opposite a man who was a better shot than I, far away out in the forest, in the bleak, cold, early morning. Fancy me, the master, standing out in the open as a target to be shot at. Pshaw!
Menpes speaks of a merry-making which he saw: "It was a festival for girls under ten, and there were hundreds of children, all with their kimonos tucked up, showing their scarlet petticoats, and looking for all the world like a mass of poppies.... Two rows or armies of these girls were placed several yards distant from each other in this long emerald-green field, and in the space between them stood two servants, each holding a long bamboo pole, and suspending from its top a flat, shallow drum, covered with tissue-paper.
Menpes has continued to draw from photographs, and the base of his artistic education being deficient from the first the result of his long abstention from Nature is apparent, even to the least critical, in the some hundred and seventy paintings, etchings, and what he calls diamond-points on ivory, on exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's.
One of the first articles began in this style, Menpes, of course, being an Australian: "I can only liken him to his native kangaroo a robber by birth born with a pocket!" "He is the claimant of lemon yellow" a color to which Mr. Menpes's letter-box, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, with the well-known butterfly cipher attached: "You will blow your brains out, of course.
The culprit, his big hat held between his hands, ducks respectfully at every second word, and looks all humility and obedience. Being an educated man, he has much sympathy with art and artists, and is delighted to help a foreigner who is painting scenes in Japan. Mr. Mortimer Menpes says: "Altogether I found the policeman the most delightful person in the world.
In French studios there is a slang phrase which expresses the meretricious charm of this picture c'est du chic; and the meaning of this very expressive term is ignorance affecting airs of capacity. Now the whole of Mr. Menpes' picture was comprised in this term.
My dear friend Graham Robertson painted two portraits of me, and I was Mortimer Menpes' first subject in England. Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema did the designs for the scenery and dresses in "Cymbeline," and incidentally designed for Imogen one of the loveliest dresses that I ever wore. It was made by Mrs. Nettleship. So were the dresses that Burne-Jones designed for me to wear in "King Arthur."
When Whistler left the White House, at Chelsea, he put this legend over the door: "'Unless the Lord build the house, their labor is but vain that build it. E.W. Godwin, P.S.A., built this one." Justin McCarthy, the journalist and historian of Our Own Times, stayed away from the Whistler dinner at the Criterion because his friend Mortimer Menpes had been slighted.
"I fancy you will admit that this is the only ass on record who ever did 'see the Angel of the Lord, and that we are past the age of miracles." Even in defeat he was triumphant. Whistler found that Mortimer Menpes, once his very dear friend, sketched in Chelsea. "How dare you sketch in my Chelsea?" he indignantly demanded. A vigorous attack on Mr. Menpes then followed in the press.
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