The Illustrative Work of Edmund Dulac
Born at the southern French city of Toulouse in October of 1882, Edmund Dulac was a French British-naturalized illustrator of books and magazines as well as designer of banknotes and stamps. Best known as an illustrator 
of gift books and children’s books, he was one of the illustrators who worked during the Golden Age of Illustration, that period from 1875 to 1920 which marked an upsurge in the quality of illustrated books.
Born the only child of Pierre Henri Aristide Dulac and Marie Catherine Pauline Rieu, Edmund Dulac grew up in a comfortable bourgeois household and was educated at the Lycée de Toulouse. By the age of sixteen, he was creating professional art nouveau work. Dulac studied law at the University of Toulouse for two years before enrolling at the École des Beaux Arts in 1900. While at school, he roomed with his close friend and fellow student Émile Rixens, who became a painter of landscapes and historical scenes.
In 1903, Dulac was awarded a scholarship to the Académie Julien in Paris where he studied for a short period. An impulsive marriage in December of 1903 to Alice May de Marini, an American thirteen years his senior, quickly dissolved. By 1904, he had left for England to pursue his artistic career. Dulac was immediately successful and joined both the London Sketch Club and the St. John’s Art Club. 
Settled in London’s Holland Park, he received his first commission: illustrations for an edition of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and nine other volumes of work by the Brontë sisters to be published by J. M. Dent & Company.
Edmund Dulac’s career flourished between 1890 and 1920, a period when British book illustration was unrivaled. Through his connections with the London Sketch Club, he began associations with London’s Leicester Gallery and publisher Hodder & Stoughton. The gallery commissioned illustrations which they sold at an annual exhibition; publishing rights for reproducing Dulac’s illustrations in yearly gift books were handled by Hodder & Stoughton. Through this partnership, Dulac illustrated multiple editions, which included “Stories from the Arabian Nights”, Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, “Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales”, “The Serpent Prince”, and “Ali Baba and Other Stories”.
Dulac also collaborated with his friends, impresario Sir Thomas Beecham and dramatist William Butler Yeats, on various theater productions. In 1920, he composed music for Yeat’s production of “At the Hawk’s Well”. Dulac, along 
with Yeats and Ezra Pound, staged Japanese Nō productions for which he designed costumes and stage sets as well as music compositions. The hardships of World War I, however, were still intensely felt in England by 1920; policy decisions and an economic depression made the publishing of elaborately illustrated book editions a rarity.
Though concerned about his income, Edmund Dulac managed on what he earned from portraits and frequent commissions by the Hearst newspaper chain for “American Weekly” cover illustrations. He widened the scope of his work to newspaper caricatures, theater costume and set designs, medals, banknotes and postage stamps. Among these stamp series were issues to celebrate King George VI’s coronation and the 1948 Summer Olympics in London.
By World War II, Dulac had become the leading authority on postage stamp design. To fulfill Charles de Gaulle’s request for a stamp to unite France’s colonies against Germany, he designed a series of stamps depicting the Cross of Lorraine, a sixteenth-century heraldic cross that soon became a symbol of Free France. For his final wartime work, Dulac designed a Victory stamp series, 
the 1944 “Marianne de Londres”. He used the widow, Léa Rixens, of his college friend Émile Rixens as the model for Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic since the French Revolution.
Dulac lived in London with British author and translator Helen Beauclerk from 1924 until his death. He illustrated two of her novels, “The Green Lacquer Pavilion” (1926) and “The Love of the Foolish Angel” (1929); she, in turn, often posed as the model for some of Dulac’s illustrations. At the close of his career, Dulac returned to illustrating children’s books with the same perfection that had characterized his earlier works. His final commission was for an edition of Milton’s “The Masque of Comus”. Halfway through this project, Edmund Dulac died from his third heart attack on the twenty-fifth of May in 1953 at the age of seventy.
Notes: A collection of Edmund Dulac’s papers, correspondence and musical compositions is house at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
A prolific illustrator, Edmund Dulac illustrated dozens of books, some of which required twenty to forty images. The Art Passions website discusses twenty of Dulac’s best known illustrative projects with images from each: https://www.artpassions.net/dulac/dulac.html
A more extensive study of the illustrators in the Golden Age of Illustration can be found in the Illustration History section of the Norman Rockwell Museum: https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/childrens-book-illustrators-in-the-golden-age-of-illustration
Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Edmund Dulac”, 1938, Half-Plate Film Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London
Second Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, “Caricature of John Singer Sargent in His Studio”, Date Unknown, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 62.2 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection
Third Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, Design for a Rug, Date Unknown, Pencil and Gouache on Paper, 12.5 x 9 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, “Inspector James Pryde S.C.”, 1915, Pencil, Pen and Ink, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Artist’s Board, 29.6 x 27.5 cm, Private Collection