National Library of Australia - Home page
NLA News - home September 2003 Volume XIII Number 12
Two Colonials in London's Bohemia: Rosa Praed and Mortimer Menpes

Patricia Clarke explores the lives of two remarkable Australian artists living in the late nineteenth century

A black and white portrait of Rosa Praed [Mrs Campbell] (1851–1935)
Rosa Praed [Mrs Campbell] (1851–1935)
Pictures Collection, neg. 4478

In the latter part of the 1880s, two expatriate Australians, the South Australian-born artist and etcher Mortimer Menpes and the Queensland-born novelist Rosa Praed, became collaborators in London. This convergence of colonial talent occurred in the slightly unconventional upper-class social and artistic world that Rosa Praed called ‘Upper Bohemia’, where writers, artists, actors, politicians and society figures came together.

Mortimer Menpes, born at Port Adelaide, left South Australia in 1878 at the age of 19, and spent the next few years studying at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington. Rosa Murray-Prior, born in the Moreton Bay District in 1851, left Brisbane for England in the early months of 1876, at the age of 24, with her English-born husband, Campbell Praed, and their two Australian-born children, Maud and Bulkley. During the latter part of the 1870s, she had two more sons, Humphrey and Geoffrey, and experimented in writing novels and short stories.

In 1880, Rosa Praed’s first novel, An Australian Heroine, was published in London by Chapman and Hall. It was well reviewed and her life as a celebrated author began. As her fame grew, the Praeds, who had been living at Rushden, a village near Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, leased a town house in London. Celebrities flocked to her home, including literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and his mother, Lady Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker and Bret Harte, actors and playwrights, painters and artists, politicians and people interested in the new wave of occultism and theosophy then sweeping English society circles. Among those drawn into this social circle was Mortimer Menpes, who held his first exhibition of etchings at the Royal Academy in 1880. His reputation as a personality kept pace with his reputation as a painter and etcher; in his own words he was ‘a painter, etcher, raconteur and rifle-shot’. He became a celebrity when he held an exhibition of paintings in London inspired by his 1887 visit to Japan—he was one of the first British artists to visit that country.

Another special member of this artistic circle was Justin McCarthy, who in 1886 began a literary collaboration with Rosa Praed. McCarthy was a well-known novelist, critic and popular historical writer, renowned for his multi-volumed A History of Our Own Times (1882). He was also constantly making news as Deputy Leader of the Irish Nationalist Party at a time when Irish Home Rule Bills were debated frequently at Westminster. McCarthy’s and Praed’s first book, ‘The Right Honourable’, a political and society novel, was widely reviewed and published in many editions. They followed this success with two more political novels, The Rebel Rose (later published as The Rival Princess: A London Romance of Today) and The Ladies Gallery.

Justin McCarthy, mid-1980s, Eaton Terrace, mid-1880s. Reproduced from Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist by Patricia Clarke (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1999).  Courtesy of Patricia Clarke ‘A City Wharf ’ by Mortimer Menpes. Reproduced from The Grey River' (London: Seeley and Co., 1889)
Justin McCarthy, Eaton Terrace, mid-1880s
Reproduced from Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist by Patricia Clarke (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1999)
Courtesy of Patricia Clarke
Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938)
‘A City Wharf ’
Reproduced from The Grey River (London: Seeley and Co., 1889)

Their next collaboration was quite different. The two writers combined with Mortimer Menpes to produce The Grey River, a large-format, illustrated book on the River Thames—an early example of the ‘coffee-table’ genre. The book was designed to capitalise on three names very much in the public eye. By 1889, when The Grey River was published, Rosa Praed had published 12 books in less than ten years, even apart from those she wrote with Justin McCarthy. Several had attracted considerable publicity—she has been described as the first Australian-born novelist to achieve a significant international reputation.

Signatures of Justin McCarthy, Mrs Praed & Mortimer Menpes. Reproduced from The Grey River (London: Seeley and Col, 1889)
Signatures of Justin McCarthy, Mrs Praed & Mortimer Menpes
Reproduced from The Grey River (London: Seeley and Co., 1889)

The Grey River was published by Seeley and Co. in a limited edition of 230 copies, selling for the high price of five guineas each. Although a columnist in the Pall Mall Gazette described the production of the book as a close collaboration—‘The three adventurers go out into the streets with note books and sketch pad picking up the picturesques’—the text and illustrations are not closely related. Many of Menpes’ illustrations are of industrial scenes—wharves, dredges, barges and warehouses—while the text by McCarthy and Praed is centred on history.

While the three were working on The Grey River, Rosa Praed also engaged Mortimer Menpes to decorate a new and larger London home, at 39 Norfolk Square, Bayswater. She was at the height of her fame, not only as a novelist and playwright, but also as a public figure whose appearances and hospitality were recorded in the social columns. She needed her new home to be suitable for her extensive entertaining. The style Menpes adopted for the Norfolk Square house was described as ‘severely modern’. In an article originally printed in Sala’s Journal, and reprinted in the Australasian, Bessie Sala wrote that the décor ‘testified to the evidence of wealth yet, like its owner, it was perfectly devoid of all ostentation’. White-enamelled bookcases lined the walls of one of the drawing rooms, the top forming a dado on which pieces of china and bowls of flowers were placed. Above were watercolours and etchings by modern artists. A piece of ‘high art’ embroidery was thrown over a magnificent grand piano that divided the two drawing rooms she described as ‘a dream of yellow and white, relieved by blue china’.

The dining room was a complete contrast, being painted entirely in sealing-wax red and hung with Australian and South Pacific curios. Praed seems to have achieved this startling colour scheme against some opposition, as she wrote to her friend, the American poet Louise Chandler Moulton: ‘I have got my red dining room after all.’ In his decoration of Praed’s home, Menpes may have been experimenting with some of the ideas he was developing for the remarkable Japanese-inspired house he built for himself in Cadogan Square, London.

Rosa and her daughter Maud, aged ten months in Rockhampton. Reproduced from Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist by Patricia Clarke (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1999). Courtesy of Patricia Clarke Drawing of Rosa Praed by Maud Praed from the Manuscript Collection
Rosa and her daughter Maud, aged ten months in Rockhampton
Reproduced from Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist by Patricia Clarke (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1999)
Courtesy of Patricia Clarke
Drawing of Rosa Praed by Maud Praed
Manuscript Collection, MS7801/5/33, neg. 4478


During their collaboration on The Grey River, and in the decoration of the Bayswater house, Menpes also became involved in teaching painting to Rosa Praed’s daughter, Maud. Soon after she arrived in England, Praed had enrolled Maud, who was deaf, in a school at Ealing run by the Society for the Training of Teachers of the Deaf, the first school in England to teach deaf children by the oral method. Throughout her life, Praed felt guilt about her daughter’s deafness. A believer in reincarnation, she regarded Maud’s deafness as a punishment for failings in one of her own previous lives. When Maud showed some artistic talent, Praed made great efforts to have her taught drawing and painting in the hope that she might become an artist.

Covers of The Ladies’ Gallery: A Novel (London: F.V. White, 1890); Madame Izan: A Tourist Story (New York: D. Appleton, 1899) and My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life by Mrs Campbell Praed (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902)
Covers of The Ladies’ Gallery: A Novel (London: F.V. White, 1890); Madame Izan: A Tourist Story (New York: D. Appleton, 1899) and My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life by Mrs Campbell Praed (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902)

Mortimer Menpes became part of this plan. He was often a weekend guest at the Praeds’ country residence and was enlisted to teach 16-year-old Maud. The Murray-Prior Papers in the National Library’s Manuscript Collection contain two letters from Maud to her grandfather, Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, in Australia, referring to Menpes. In 1890 she wrote that ‘Mr Menpes’ while visiting Rushden had given her some lessons:

First of all, he wrote down about the colours for me, & put them on my palette, in successive order—white in the centre, with reds on one side, & yellows on the other side, & placed some black & white rags apart on the lawn on which we gazed from the terrace. They helped me to see the difference between the dark & light colours. On beginning to paint, he mixed some colours on the palette with [a] … knife in order to match the tones, & when the colour which he had mixed was quite similar to … what he saw, he painted on a square piece of wood with the knife awkwardly. Then I began to paint the small picture of a flower in a vase full of water, & being greatly interested about painting, I continued it, & liked it immensely.

Maud continued studying under several teachers, including Margaret Grant who had landscape paintings hung in the Royal Academy, but Mortimer Menpes remained an important influence. Two years later Maud wrote that all she wanted to do was ‘work & talk about art’. She continued: ‘It is just the same with Mr Menpes. We are both worried about our works. I feel that the work keeps me away from all the trifling troubles and is the main consolation in my life.’ Rosa Praed encouraged her daughter by using some of Maud’s drawings to illustrate her books and articles. There is a drawing by Maud of a bottle tree in Rosa’s semi-autobiographical book, My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life (1902), and several of Maud’s drawings were published in the London fortnightly The Queen in 1895 to illustrate a six-part series Praed wrote after visiting Sri Lanka (Ceylon) with her daughter.

A oil painting of a portrait of himself [between 1900 and 1909] by Mortimer Menpes after an original painting by Rembrandt H. van Rijn
Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938)
Portrait of Himself [between 1900 and 1909]
after an original painting by Rembrandt H. van Rijn
shellac on oil on cardboard;
40.6 x 32.7 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23515553

Did Rosa Praed and Mortimer Menpes, so successful in London, ever talk about Australia? A record of a conversation between Praed, Menpes and the English poet and playwright Herman Charles Merivale about British methods of colonisation gives some indication that they did. Praed, an inveterate note-taker, recorded Menpes saying: ‘Look at Australia. What has become of the blackfellow. He’s gone. We didn’t murder him—oh no. We send missionaries among them, we build towns & open grog shanties, we serve out blankets in the township on the Queen’s birthday & buy up their ’possum rugs & sell ’em again in the English market for carriage rugs. We ask them to dine & treat them to liquor—and they die.’ When Merivale rather vaguely suggested the climate might be to blame, Menpes replied, ‘They had a climate for 80 000 years.’

Mortimer Menpes was also influential in Rosa Praed’s decision to travel via Japan when returning to England after a short visit to Australia in 1895. As a result of this visit she wrote a novel, Madame Izàn: A Tourist Story, published in 1899, in which she raised the then daring subject of an interracial marriage between a Japanese man and an Irish woman. Although undocumented, the association between Rosa Praed and Mortimer Menpes appears to have continued. In 1900, Menpes was a war artist in South Africa covering the Boer War for Black and White, a publication in which Campbell Praed had a financial interest.

Neither Rosa Praed nor Mortimer Menpes returned to live in Australia. Praed died, aged 84, at Torquay, Devon, on 10 April 1935, and Menpes died on 1 April 1938 at Pangbourne, Berkshire. Their efforts to encourage Maud to become an artist came to nothing. Towards the end of the 1890s, Maud Praed was confined to a mental asylum where she was to remain for more than 40 years until her death in 1941.

In recent years there has been renewed interest in these two expatriates whose lives ran parallel during their years of fame in England. In 2002 Mortimer Menpes’ reproductions of old masters, which he left to the Australian nation, were exhibited in the National Library’s exhibition program. A biography of Rosa Praed has been recently published—the first for over 50 years—and her writing is the subject of frequent articles.

PATRICIA CLARKE is a writer and editor. She is the author of eight books on women in nineteenth-century Australia, including Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (1999)

Back to NLA News Index Back to September Issue Back to NLA Home Page
NLA News - home

To order a particular issue of the NLA News e-mail kpagden@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.