Nagasaki Under the Bridge

Menpes was born in Adelaide in South Australia and later moved to London with his parents. He shared a studio with Whistler in the 1880s and even shared a flat with him at Cheyne Walk on the Chelsea Embankment in London. “I have educated and trained you ... You are but the medium translating the ideas of the Master,” Whistler wrote to Menpes.

Menpes became a major figure in the etching revival, producing more than seven hundred different etchings and drypoints, which he usually printed himself. A visit to Japan in 1887 led to his first one-man exhibition at Dowdeswell's Gallery in London. This panoramic format etching may derive from that trip to the East. It has parallels to Whistler’s etching Westminster Bridge in Progress (1861), which shows a similar low vantage point.

Menpes moved into a property at 25 Cadogan Gardens, Sloane Square, designed for him by A. H. Mackmurdo 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 shameless copying of his own ideas.