MURPHY AND HIS DONKEY

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22201, 18 September 1937, Page 20

MURPHY AND HIS DONKEY

TO THJi riMTO* OF TUB PRBSS. Sir, —It may be of interest to add that the original artist's cartoon from which Sapper Moore-Jones's nowfamous picture of "Murphy and his Donkey" was painted is in the Canterbury Officers' Club, to which I lent it some years ago. It came into my possession after Mr Moore-Jones's lecturing tour. He had prepared the cartoon in water-colours to illustrate one of his lectures and I understood from him that he had not yet painted the final picture. I happened to know the artist's family in Auckland and was before the war occasionally in his studio. On this lecturing tour, after his return from the war, he came to Timaru and I was particularly attracted by the Murphy story and asked permission to buy the cartoon when the tour was finished. It was a lurid piece in the Victorian manner of battle-pictures, intended merely in the first instance to illustrate the heroIsm of the Australian soldier to whom the diggers applied his donkey's name, but even the cartoon lived and gripped one. Mr Moore-Jones told me that he was accepting commissions for a limited number of copies of this picture and others he proposed to paint, each at a minimum cost of about £SO, according to size and character. I could not look at anything like £SO, but I got the cartoon for considerably less, kindly finished off enough for framing, so that it is a water-colour original, and the original, the masterfiketch. Owing to changes in my domestic conditions, I could not conveniently house the picture, which is rather large, and I offered it to the Society of Arts on long loan, but it refused it, or the secretary did. It found an appropriate home in the Officers' Club. How many copies Mr Moore-Jones painted from the cartoon I do not know, but into the one he did for the Australian Government he naturally put his utmost best. Soon after his return from his lrcturing tour he had postcard copies lithographed (in England, I believe) and they were widely 6old.—Yours, etc., (CANON) H. O. HANBY. September 17, 1937.