JEWELLERY, ANTIQUE & ART AUCTION Tuesday, 8 September 2020 - 10:00 AM start
An original production lithograph of Private Simpson and his donkey at Gallipoli
Lot Details
from the original watercolour by Sapper H. Moore-Jones, printed inscription across the lower front 'With the Compliments of Hill & Plummer Ltd, Oil & Colour Merchants...Auckland'. 325 x 225mm, framed under glass, details on reverse. Note: This iconic image actually is Henderson and his donkey. When Moore-Jones painted the dramatic and poignant scene, he believed the man in the photograph was Englishman John Simpson Kirkpatrick, who had jumped ship in Australia in 1910 and enlisted four years later under the name John Simpson. Moore-Jones named the painting Simpson and his Donkey and for many years it was known as that or The Man With the Donkey. Henderson was not identified as the stretcher bearer until the early 1930s, several years after Moore-Jones died of severe burns while rescuing people from a Hamilton hotel fire in 1922. Dick Henderson was born in Waihi, at the foot of the Coromandel Peninsula on August 26, 1895. When war broke out in 1914 he was teaching in Auckland and like many young men of the fledgling colonial nation, he enlisted. He was 19 when he joined the 3/258 2nd Field Ambulance of the New Zealand Medical Corps. He landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 and was immediately was put to work tending to some of the hundreds of Anzac soldiers who were wounded by Turkish rifle or machine gun fire as they tried to take the formidable cliffs of Anzac Cove. He survived Gallipoli and later was awarded The Military Medal for bravery for rescuing wounded soldiers under heavy enemy fire at the Somme on the Western Front on October 16, 1916.
