When Australian-born Menpes turned twenty, his family moved back to Britain. After meeting Whistler on a sketching tour in Brittany in 1880, he developed a fascination with all things Japanese. In the wake of popular events like the International Exhibition in London of 1862, the West had been introduced to Japanese art and culture after opening up to Western trade in the 1850s. Menpes actually travelled to Japan in 1887, the first of many travels (Whistler never did visit Japan, and inevitably fell out with Menpes whom he said had ‘stolen Japan’ from him). His purpose was ‘to study all the methods of Japanese art’ and to ‘learn all the lessons possible from it and from the Japanese artists.’ In doing so, he was highly unusual in having absorbed the lessons which Japan had to teach first hand, instead of appropriating a semblance of ‘Japonisme’ from exhibitions in the West. Menpes felt there were too many Westerners in Yokohama, and that Tokyo was too formal (he disliked seeing so many Japanese in Western dress, which he felt was unbecoming). Although he found Kyoto a joy, he loved Osaka the most, calling it the ‘Venice of Japan.’ He spoke at a conference of Japanese artists and took part in a discussion after, during which explained that the boorish Western merchants in the trading ports did not represent good taste, and that they should adhere to their own values; his remarks were published in a Japanese periodical two days later. The highlight of the visit for Menpes for meeting the great master painter Kawanabe Kyosai, then at the height of his career, and henceforth Menpes tried to emulate Kyosai's method of observation and rapid sketching. He did not try to be a Japanese artist, but he observed and painted quickly scenes of Japanese town-life, customs and rituals. On his return, the little paintings of Japanese life which Menpes brought back to Britain sold out in Dowdeswell's exhibition of them in London.

This picture is from his second, 1896/7 trip, which, after Dowdeswell's 1897 exhibition again sold out, was as successful as his first. In this picture of a geisha playing a shamisen, a three-stringed instrument plucked with a plectrum, Menpes used ultramarines and lakes on a stark white ground to generate deep luminous tones and glowing light. In his book Japan, a Record in Colour (A&C Black, 1901), he later wrote: ‘It is the artist’s ambition that she [a geisha] should be a picture, perfect in every detail, and the geisha is always a picture, beautiful beyond description.’