The Mother of Pont-Aven (Marie Jeanne)

Mortimer Luddington Menpes

Australian born printmaker Mortimer Luddington Menpes studied with James A.M. Whistler in 1880-81 and assisted Whistler with printing his etchings.

This etching is a portrait done by Menpes after a painting titled "Marie Jeanne" illustrated in Mortimer and Dorothy Menpes' book "Brittany", published by Adam & Charles Black in 1905. Michael L. Gaffer in the Atlas Galleries' catalog on Menpes' prints comments: "Edition sizes are seldom recorded and vary with subject and technique...some of his earlier drypoint portraits are numbered from editions of 25, and the later Venetian views are from editions of 70. It is also thought that many of his prints were not printed to a compete edition, the number of impressions pulled being determined by the wear of the plate and the demand for the works."

M.H. Spielmann commented on Menpes' portraiture in 'The Magazine of Art' in 1899: "He has turned portraiture as the severest schooling through which a man can pass - for he, obviously, cannot agree with the foolish tenet of certain lights among his associates of his early days, that the features in a portrait are merely 'an accident..."