Horace Moore-Jones

Simpson and his donkey, Gallipoli painting

At the outbreak of war in 1914, Horace Moore-Jones was living in Britain. He was 42 years old, but gave his age as 32 so he could enlist with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF). Moore-Jones was sent to Gallipoli with the Engineers, but was soon deployed to draw topographical maps of the area for military purposes. Towards the end of 1915 his drawing hand was injured, but while recovering in England he somehow managed to produce almost 80 watercolours of Gallipoli.

These watercolours were first exhibited at New Zealand House, London, in April 1916, and were received well by the military and public. The head of NZEF, Alexander Godley, said ‘Nothing that I have seen or read on the subject of Anzac brings more vividly to my memory the pleasantest features of our sojourn there.’ Moore-Jones was more critical of his experience, saying Gallipoli was like eight months of hell:

You can imaging what it must be like to live, day after day, facing plateaus that are covered with one’s dead comrades, whose faces had grown black by the time we could reach them, and the over-powering sickening stench. And what it meant to sit, eating one’s bread and jam surrounded by millions of flies who had been bred on dead bodies.

Moore-Jones returned to New Zealand in 1917 after being declared medically unfit. He toured his highly successful watercolours throughout the country. They became departure points for his ‘descriptive lectures’ about the campaign. The New Zealand government refused to buy the watercolours so in 1920 he sold them to the Australian government for £1500 (about $110,000 today). The series is available to view on the Australian War Memorial website, and has become ‘a vital part of the art collection of the Australian War memorial [as they] provide a quiet, but honest, contemporary record of the terrain of Gallipoli. They are poignant human documents.’

Moore-Jones’s most widely recognised work was not painted at the battlefront, but from a photograph. His depiction of Private Simpson and his donkey was done when Moore-Jones was touring his watercolours in Dunedin in 1918, three years after the Gallipoli landings. He altered the composition of the photo to make for a more dramatic drawing.

Moore-Jones died of burns received while rescuing people from a hotel fire in 1922.

Further Information

• Horace Moore-Jones biography (DNZB)
• Horace Millichamp Moore-Jones paintings (War Art – Archives New Zealand)