THE PAINTER OF SIMPSON AND

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 87, 9 October 1937, Page 27

THE PAINTER OF SIMPSON AND

HIS DONKEY

There have been many references lately to the purchase by the Soi\h Australian Government of the painting "Simpson and the Donkey," by the New Zealand artist Horace MooreJones (writes William Gill in the "Sydney Morning Herald"). Moore-Jones was a lovable man, and a distinguished artist, who, rising superior to life's vicissitudes, achieved splendid things. His death was an epic. We were intimate friends for nearly thirty years. He lived for years in Sydney, working in the studio at the rear of George Street with his crippled wife, who was also an artist and a talented sculptress. They lived* at Hunter's Hill, and a common sight at the riverside suburb was Horace Moore-Jones lifting her bodily up in his arms and carrying her to the wharf, or bearing her home. After her death, we joined forces, and, taking a weatherboard cottage at the Glebe, bached together. "Spider," as he was known to his intimates, was in England when war broke out. Notwithstanding his years, he immediately enlisted in the British section of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, which joined up with the main body in Egypt on Christmas Day, 1914, and was posted to the First Field Company of the Engineers. He proceeded with his unit to Gallipoli, taking part in the landing at Anzac Cove, and served as a sapper qn the ridges. He was sketching one day when an officer saw him, and made a report to Sir lan Hamilton. After that, Horace Moore-Jones was given work for which his talents as an artist fitted him. He practically became a unit by himself. He was constantly engaged in making sketches, sometimes from

balloons anchored to warships iii the roadstead. He was thus given the opportunity of placing on canvas his remarkable impressions of that shelltorn country, and much of his work was sent to London with official dispatches.

Invalided through jaundice, he was returned to England. It was during the period of convalescence that he worked on many of his unfinished sketches, and brought to perfection his Gallipoli pictures., They were placed on view in the New Zealand building, and created such a stir that he was commanded to exhibit them before the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. Moore-Jones found himself famous. And orders for pictures poured in from all parts of the United Kingdom. He died on April 3; 1922. This extract from a leader in the "New Zealand Herald," Auckland, tells the story: "If to New Zealanders Anzac is as Thermopylae to the ancient Greeks, it is simply because the men who fought at Anzac held their lives as cheap, and their honour as precious as did Mr. Moore-Jones when he found that in the burning hotel were still women to be rescued. There was an Englishman who, some nine years ago, walked out of his tent in Antarctica into a shrieking snowstorm to give up his life for his friends. He is remembered by the whole world as Captain Oates, a modest British hero. Remembering how Mr. Moore-Jones walked back into a raging fire and gave up his life for strangers, thousands of New Zealanders will today turn in spirit to the smoking ruins of the Hamilton Hotel, and repeat Captain Oates's epitaph—'Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.'"