école des beaux arts paris – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

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

The Artwork of Sir Edward John Poynter

Sir Edward John Poynter was an English designer, draftsman and painter who became best known for his large-scale historical paintings. A leading artists of Neo-Classicism in Victorian England, he made paintings that were early innovators of the Aesthetic Movement. Poynter created works in watercolor and fresco; he also produced designs for stained glass, tiled mosaics and ceramics.

Edward Poynter was the only son of four children born to architect Ambrose Poynter and Emma Forster, the grand-daughter of sculptor Thomas Banks. He studied between 1848 and 1852 at Westminster School and Brighton College, and later at the studio of watercolorist Thomas Shotter Boys. In the winter of 1853, Poynter traveled to Rome where he worked in the studio of Frederic Leighton, a classical painter and sculptor of the academic style. Upon his return to England, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1855.

Relocating to Paris in 1856, Poynter entered the leading, private atelier of Swiss painter Charles Gleyre and, later, the École des Beaux Arts where he met his fellow students: illustrator George Du Mauier, and painters James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Armstrong. Poynter began working for a London glassworks firm in 1860; six years later, he married Agnes MacDonald, the daughter of Scottish Reverend George Brown MacDonald and Hannah Jones. At this time, he was creating illustrations for magazines, such as the “London Society”, and books including the popular 1880 “Bible Gallery” by the Dalziels engravers.

Edward Poynter began exhibiting Orientalist paintings at London’s Royal Academy in 1861. He traveled to Venice in 1868 to study decorative mosaics; upon his return in the following year, Poynter was elected as a member of the Royal Academy. He received commissions for a series of frieze designs for the Royal Albert Hall, and a mosaic of Saint George and the Dragon for the British Houses of Parliament. In 1871, Poynter was appointed the first Slade Professor at London’s University College where he served until his resignation in 1875. After he left the college, he was appointed the director and principal of the National Art Training School located in South Kensington.

During his years at the National Art Training School, Poynter made several reforms to its operation and published a series of art history textbooks. He also executed many commissioned public painting projects for which he is remembered, including the 1880 “Visit to Aesculapius”, now at the Tate Gallery, and “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon”, created in 1890 and now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In 1894, Poynter was appointed Director of the National Gallery, London where he achieved a number of important acquisitions. These included works by Rembrandt, Antonio di Puccio Pisano (Pisanello), Titian, Francisco de Goya., Lorenzo Monaco, and Francisco de Zubaran.

Edward Poynter retired from the National Gallery in 1905 but retained the directorship until 1918. He was knighted in 1896, created Baronet of Albert Gate, in the city of Westminster in 1902, and received the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1918. As his health failed, Poynter sold his extensive collection of master drawings..

Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet GCVO, PRA died on the twenty-sixth of July in 1919 at his house and studio in Kensington and is buried in London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Considered primarily as an academic artist, Sir Edward Poynter’s contribution to art history is significant. In his position as director of the National Gallery, he issued in 1899 the first complete illustrated catalog of its collection.

A cosmopolitan artist, Poynter did not shrink from portrayal of the nude or works that glorified its sensual qualities. Modernists frequently criticized his artwork and presented him as the embodiment of the stilted “Victorian Olympian”. However, Poynter’s work in art education and art-historical survey texts became the model for the next generation of educators and researchers.

Notes: The Eclectic Light Company website has an article on Edward Poynter’s life and work at: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/08/09/edward-poynters-classical-stories-1-to-1880/

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has a short article on Edward Poynter’s 1881-1890 “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon” on its website: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/artworks-in-focus/sir-edward-john-poynter/

Top Insert Image: Alexander Bassano, “Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Bt”, 1883, Half-Plate Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Edward Poynter, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, 1862, Oil on Canvas, 51.2 x 71.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope, “Portrait of Sir Edward Poynter, Bt, PRA”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 110.5 x 85.1 cm, Royal Academy of Arts

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Poynter, “Catapulta (The Catapult)”, 1868, Oil on Canvas, 155.5 x 183.8 cm, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle on Tyne, United Kingdom