De Luxe edition. Number 981 of 1000 only copies.

A Great First Edition displaying the RAJ at its height

 The Durbar’, originally published in 1903, is one of Mortimer Menpes and Dorothy Menpes’s first collaborations. Featuring 100 colour prints of Mortimer Menpes’s beautiful watercolour paintings with Dorothy’s transcribed anecdotes it provides an illustrated record of the commemoration in Delhi of the coronation of King Edward VI

Mortimer Luddington Menpes (22 February 1855 – 1 April 1938), was an Australian-born British painter, author, printmaker, and illustrator. Menpes painted in oil and watercolour as well as being a prolific printmaker, producing over 700 etchings and drypoints during his career to great acclaim. A definitive catalog raisonne of his printed works was published in 2012 which also included an extensive biography and his exhibition history.

He developed a special form of colour etching and exhibited coloured etchings at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in London in late 1911/early 1912. He was also a pioneer, with Carl Hentschel (1864–1926), in the development of techniques to reproduce coloured art works in book form. His book, ‘War Impressions’, published in April 1901 by A. & C. Black, was the first book to faithfully reproduce art works in colour, based on watercolours done by Menpes in South Africa, and therefore was the forerunner of all illustrated art books. Menpes also founded the Menpes Press of London and Watford to produce coloured illustrated books using the Hentschel Colourtype Process, which was a photographic process that involved taking three photographs of an artwork using three different colour filters (red, blue and yellow) and then combining them in the printing process. Menpes was a great traveller and undertook artistic journeys to Japan, China, Burma, Kashmir, Mexico, India, Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt as well as within Europe to Brittany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and other places, often returning from such travels to mount exhibitions of his works. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Menpes also produced the “Menpes Series of Great Masters”, which were copies by him of works by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Van Dyck and others which were reproduced in printed form for sale. In 1911, Menpes donated 38 of his copies in oil to the Australian Government; these works have subsequently become part of the Pictures Collection at the National Library of Australia.

Some pencil sketches by Menpes were published in the Adelaide Observer in 1903. They are portraits of Sir Charles Todd, Sir James Fergusson and the Rev. Canon Green; Dean Marryat, Sir Anthony Musgrave and Dr. Schomburgk; Charles Mann, Sir Arthur Blyth and William Townsend Sir William Milne, Thomas Playford and George Stevenson, Jun.