Edmund Dulac was born into a middle class family in the French city of Toulouse in 1882.
And although his artistic talent and inclinations were obvious in childhood
his parents pressured him into studying law at Toulouse University.
But after 2 miserable years he quit the law degree to study full-time at the School of Fine Arts.
3 years later he travelled to Paris to study at the Academie Julian, but he didn't much care
for it and in 1903 he returned to Toulouse where he somewhat impulsively got married.
Within a year the marriage was over and he returned to Paris
in the hope of finding work as an illustrator.
But the publishing houses of Paris weren't interested and he decided to try his luck in
London, which at the time was the biggest centre for book publishing and illustration in Europe.
And within a couple of weeks of his arrival in London he landed a major
commission from a respected British publishing house.
He was asked to create a total of 60 full colour illustrations
for the collected novels of the Bronte sisters, which were published in 1905.
Dulac's watercolours were competent enough in their execution,
although nothing out of the ordinary. But if nothing else the prestigious
nature of the commission helped him to establish a reputation.
At this time Arthur Rackham, who was 15 years older and a strong stylistic influence on Dulac,
was enjoying immense success with his illustrations for the hugely popular
illustrated volumes known as gift books. Dulac resolved to emulate this success and
he duly presented his portfolio to the Leicester Galleries in London,
which was where Rackham sold his original illustrations.
They were impressed and commissioned him to create 50 watercolour illustrations for what would be a
remarkable and career-defining visualisation of Tales From The Arabian Nights in 1907.
And when the gallery displayed his original watercolours they sold out
before the exhibition even opened to the public.
So they eagerly extended Dulac's contract
to produce a new book every year for the next 7 years.
Under the terms of the agreement he would receive no royalties from the sale of the books,
but the fees paid to Dulac were apparently much greater than was usual.
In the same year he illustrated Fairies I Have Met, written by Maud Stawell.
And although I have no hard evidence it's highly likely that he would have received
royalties for this book as it was commissioned outside his agreement with the gallery.
His next contracted project was an illustrated edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1908,
and Dulac's delicate stylistic approach evoked the mood and magic of the Bard's final
dramatic work with considerable creative success.
In the same year he published the book Lyrics Pathetic and Humorous,
a series of absurd limericks written and illustrated by Dulac
with considerably more comic styling than previously seen in his work.
And this was an example of another book which was created independently from his contract.
In 1909 he returned to Arabic themes with a visualisation of The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam which was every bit as absorbing as the earlier Arabian Nights collection.
And he continued to play to his strengths with Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales
which was published in 1910.
And the following year's offering was Stories from Hans Ander­sen,
another project tailor-made for Dulac's evocative romantic touch.
By this point he had become one of the highest paid illustrators in Britain,
despite his flat fee agreement with the gallery.
He also married again, this time more successfully
than his first attempt, and in 1912 he took British citizenship.
This was also the year his breathtaking edition of
The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe was published.
In this book he explored far darker terrain than the texts he had made his earlier reputation with,
and he did it with great success. There were some monochrome page
headers dotted throughout the book, but it was the atmospheric beauty of his doom-laden
desaturated watercolours which defined the work as one of his greatest achievements.
The book proved to be immensely popular with afflu ent readers of such verse
and its more serious tone brought it more than usual critical acclaim.
1913's gift book Princess Badoura was a return to more expected material.
Although this story was extracted from the Arabian Nights it gave him the opportunity to
explore the art of the far east as the Princess and other characters were of Chinese origin.
His incorporation of this more mannered stylistic influence was yet another clear demonstration
of his creative imagination and versatility.
And when Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories was published in 1914
there were clear signs that Dulac's style was now some distance from
the Northern European approach of Rackham and other contemporaries.
He had long been fascinated by the art and culture of the middle East, and he indulged
that interest in the book, with images which largely dispensed with conventional perspective,
and concentrated more on the purely aesthetic combination of shape and colour.
The illustrations made great use of patterns and textures with a far more saturated
palette than previously, and considerably less reliance on pen and ink line work.
This was the last publication from his original contract
but Leicester Galleries offered another contract for 3 more years.
But the outbreak of war in that year put paid to this plan.
Wartime restrictions on the supply of paper and print production
seriously impeded the world of publishing.
With his income severely reduced Dulac rapidly became depressed, but he did contribute some
illustrations to 2 books published to raise money for the allied forces.
He also published the his own volume The Edmund Dulac Fairy Book,
the proceeds of which went to assist the work of the French Red Cross.
There was also The Dreamer of Dreams, written by the Queen of Romania,
and published in 1915 but this book only contained 6 colour images.
He also started getting involved in more peripheral work
including some theatrical productions and creating graphically stylised caricatures
of well known figures which were published in a few magazines.
When the war ended in 1918 his edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales
was published, and this provided yet more evidence of how his more recent stylised approach had taken
over his output and it featured fourteen formally constructed but highly decorative watercolours.
The book was successful but unfortunately it would prove to be Dulac's final gift book.
In the chastened atmosphere and cultural landscape of the post-war years these lavish and expensive
books were one of many cultural phenomena that disappeared practically overnight.
Although the gift book was now extinct Dulac continued to illustrate more modest volumes.
1920 saw the publication of Leonard Rosenthal's book The Kingdom of the Pearl,
but although Dulac's illustrations were every bit as engaging as his
earlier books now there were only a handful. Following his separation from his second wife
he also created images for a couple of novels by his lover Helen Beauclerk .
The Green Lacquer Pavilion in 1926 and The Love of the Foolish Angel three years later
were both illustrated with woodcuts in an overtly art deco style.
He used the same technique for the spot illustrations
in his 1927 edition of Treasure Island,
And although the colour pages were the expected watercolour renders, in this
publication virtually all were distant aerial views where the figures were almost incidental.
In 1935 Country Life published Gods and Mortals in Love
with 9 colour images which had first appeared serially in the magazine.
This was a remarkably attractive collection which once again largely dispensed with naturalism.
still unable to generate enough book work to keep him gainfully occupied
in the 1930s he began working as a designer of commemorative postage stamps .
The book The Daughter of the Stars was published in 1939
but due to constraints applied during the Second World War, it featured just 2 colour images.
other than the design of some wartime currency his output was practi cally non-existent,
and it wasn't until the later 1940s that he returned to the illustration of books.
In 1950 The Golden Cockerel by Alexander Pushkin was published,
and this was a serious return to form..
The project was obviously a real labour of love, and in addition to writing a
translation of the story in English he created a series of beautiful Russian
folk art influenced illustrations and designed the layout of the entire book.
The Marriage of Cupid And Psyche was published as a limited edition in 1951,
and this series of mannered erotic images represented another clear indication
of Dulac's persistent creativity and aesthetic judgement in all his narrative work.
Unfortunately this would be his last completed project.
Two years later in 1953 he died of a heart attack at the age of 71
while working on illustrations for John Milton's Masque of Comus.
Edmund Dulac was undoubtedly one of the Golden Age's most significant and versatile illustrators
and in a career which spanned half a century he created some of the
most iconic and enduring fantasy images ever seen.
His visions of magical faraway places and exotic characters have been a major influence
on many later illustrators and they continue to exert a powerful hold on all our imaginations.