Edmund Dulac

Edmund Dulac was born in Toulouse. Dulac studied drawing and painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Toulouse where he discovered the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, and William Morris. He briefly attended the Académie Julian in Paris. An Anglophile, he took English lessons, habitually dressed in the English fashion, with tight trousers, spats, white gloves, and a cane, and gained the nickname ‘l’Anglais’. He moved to London in 1904 and became naturalised in 1912. Dulac had immense flair for book illustration and important commissions included illustrations for the Brontë novels, The Arabian Nights (1907), The Tempest (1908) and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1909) followed. In 1912 Dulac moved into one of a group of studios that the philanthropist and collector Edmund Davis had built in Ladbroke Road where he flourished in the social and artistic world of this part of north London. At Davis’s house nearby, he met the artists Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, and others, including W. B. Yeats, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Out of the friendship between Dulac and Yeats a variety of artistic projects grew, including the design at Yeats’s suggestion of a proposed coinage for the Irish Free State, and collaboration on his play At the Hawk’s Well. For this Dulac designed the scenery and costumes, composed the incidental music, and took part in the first performance in 1916. Dulac’s output was prolific and he designed stamps, coins, and medals, including the king’s poetry medal (1935), and wallpaper, industrial brochures, playing cards, and banknotes. Dulac died on 25 May 1953 from a heart attack brought on by a bout of flamenco dancing.