A Breton Beggar

Mortimer Menpes was a painter, watercolorist, etcher, and author who was born in Australia but lived and worked in England. He travelled extensively, creating works in Japan, South Africa, and Venice. Menpes was a central figure in the nineteenth-century etching revival in Great Britain. Etching revivalists posited that etching should be seen as an independent mode of creating art, opposing the perception that printmaking is limited to a method of replicating paintings.