Mortimer Menpes happily played the loyal and obedient follower to famed nineteenth-century artist James McNeil Whistler for nearly a decade. Then abruptly, the relationship ended and barely a word passed between them again. Upon Whistler's death some twenty years later, Menpes reemerged to put to print this first-hand portrait of his former master; capturing Whistler's working methods, his daily routines, his interests, and his eccentricities. As the International Studio worte on the book's original publication: "In reading this remarkable book, with its exaggerations and distortions of fact, its cutting satire, but withal its under-current of real affection for and appreciation of, its subject, it is impossible to help wondering what the effect of it would have been upon Whistler himself had it been published during his lifetime."
Mortimer Menpes happily played the loyal and obedient follower to famed nineteenth-century artist James McNeil Whistler for nearly a decade. Then abruptly, the relationship ended and barely a word passed between them again. Upon Whistler's death some twenty years later, Menpes reemerged to put to print this first-hand portrait of his former master; capturing Whistler's working methods, his daily routines, his interests, and his eccentricities. As the International Studio worte on the book's original publication: "In reading this remarkable book, with its exaggerations and distortions of fact, its cutting satire, but withal its under-current of real affection for and appreciation of, its subject, it is impossible to help wondering what the effect of it would have been upon Whistler himself had it been published during his lifetime."