Edmund DULAC
1882–1953, France/England
Edmond Dulac biorgaphy:
Edmond Dulac was born in Toulouse, France. His artistic bent manifested itself early and drawings exist from his early teens. Many of these early efforts are watercolors, a medium he would favor through most of his life. He studied law at the University of Toulouse for two years while attending classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. As Colin White puts it in his inestimable Edmund Dulac, "Two years of boredom at the law school and the winning of a prize at the Ecole des Beaux Arts convinced Dulac where his future lay." He left law school and enrolled full-time in the Ecole. He won the 1901 and 1903 Grand Prix for his paintings submitted to the annual competitions. A scholarship took him to Paris and the Académie Julien where he stayed for three weeks. That same year (1904) he left for London and the start of a meteoric career.
It's important to understand the timing of Dulac's arrival in London. Until the mid-1890s, there had been no economical method of reproducing color plates. Printing methods in those days varied from printer to printer and were most often patented - and were always being improved. The invention of the process we now call "color separation" made it possible to mass-produce color images and by 1905 they improved the process to create images that were very faithful to the originals. The only drawback was that they had to be printed on a special coated paper and therefore couldn't be bound into the book with the rest of the pages. They had to be tipped-in. One of the earliest manifestations of this was Arthur Rackham's Rip Van Winkle in 1905. The illustrated gift-book was born just as Edmund Dulac arrived. Rackham was a grizzled veteran of ten years in the illustration business and Dulac was looking for his first assignment. How odd that these two men would dominate the new market.
Dulac's first book assignment was for the publisher J.M. Dent's collected works of the Bronte sisters. It's a testament to Dulac's skills that he, a 22-year-old, unpublished foreigner, was given a commission for 60 color illustrations (sample at left). It's also a reflection of the degree to which this Frenchman had been Anglicized that he was soon contributing to the Pall Mall Magazine along with Rackham and Robinson.
An interesting aspect of these early illustrations is that they don't depend on an ink line to hold the color. Rackham especially and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Robinsons tended to approach the new color medium almost as a colored ink drawing. Dulac, though capable of pen and ink work, was primarily a painter and used the new technology's ability to reproduce exact tones to let the color hold the shape and define the object. This is one of the effects of Dulac's timing. The color separation process was "perfected" just at the exact moment he arrived and he never had to deal with the old-fashioned necessity of an ink line bounding the color to hide misregistration.
With the wild success of Rackham's Rip Van Winkle and his 1906 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, other publishers were looking for artists to produce their own gift books. Hodder and Stoughton had published Rackham's Peter Pan. When Rackham signed with Wm Heinemann, it was Edmond Dulac, on the recommendation of Leicester Gallery, that Hodder and Stoughton turned to to illustrate The Arabian Nights for 1907 (top image above). Actually, the paintings were commissioned by the Leicester Gallery which sold the reproduction rights to H&S and then sold the paintings after publication of the book. Dulac would repeat this arrangement with the gallery for years, one book at a time...