EDMUND DULAC (BRITISH 1882-1953)

In June 1909 the publishers Hodder and Stoughton announced the publication of their giftbook of the year The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a centenary tribute to its translator Edward Fitzgerald, with twenty colour plates from watercolours by Edmund Dulac. Dulac's illustrations are considered amongst his finest, his syle more evocative with a studied exoticism, 'deep blues and greens of the warm starry nights allowing the colours, narrow in tonal range and tight in organisation, painted in a manner that would have been impossible to reproduce in books a generation earlier, to flow into one another. (C. White, Edmund Dulac, London, 1976, p. 42).
Here for the first time Dulac created depth, in these illustrations, as perhaps nowhere else, 'he revealed the full depth of insight into the character he was portraying'. The work marked the success of Dulac who at just thirty-one was now considered one of the most gifted and highest paid illustrators of his time. His watercolour illustrations were issued in a deluxe edition of 750 copies which was oversubscribed before publication. The original watercolours were exhibited soon after publication at the annual exhibition of Dulac's work at the Leicester Gallery, where Rackham also exhibited and enjoyed enormous popularity. The present drawing illustrates Canto 22.