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<\/a><\/p>\nExhibition, I read. Opening days: November 23rd until Christmas.\u00a0 Place: Leicester Square. And I thought, Oh my goodness, we were there last week, how could I have missed it? What a shame! Now, I confess that was a very fleeting thought, as the date was indeed November 23 to Christmas, but the year was\u00a01912<\/i>, fully a century ago.<\/p>\n
But, that’s all it takes to set my mind awhirl: imagining Leicester Square in 1912, imagining the gallery, the opening of the show, the exquisite originals on the walls, the hum of conversations… and thinking that yes, wouldn’t it be wonderful to set a century aside briefly and step back for an hour to visit an exhibition rather than going to a screening.<\/p>\n
Somehow that odd coincidence, to which is added the fact that by some miracle that loose sheet of paper remained in the book for a hundred years, briefly suspended a full century and made possible a fleeting instant, dream-like and intense. An absence of mindedness, which was suddenly filled with a gale of emotion. I can’t honestly describe it.<\/p>\n
But, what I would give to do it for real.<\/p>\n
From the catalogue for an exhibition of cartoons by Max Beerbohm (1872-1956).April-May 1913.<\/em><\/p>\n I bought The Bells<\/em> (published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1912) a few years ago, so enamoured am I of Dulac\u2019s extraordinary illustrations to the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It\u2019s not the lighter Dulac you most likely know. The series of images, twenty-eight in all, is as sombre and gloomy as the texts, a darker Dulac, possibly influenced by the storm-clouds building over his native France.<\/p>\n Edgar Allan Poe had died over half a century earlier, after being found delirious in the streets of Boston, “in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance”. He never regained his lucidity and died four days later, in the early morning of October 7, 1849.<\/p>\n In the half-century after his death, although he had lived in near-poverty for most of his life, his writing had gained in popularity and esteem. His Poems<\/em> were published in London as part of the highly-regarded Endymion<\/em> series, with authors like Tennyson, Shelley, Keats and Milton, and illustrated by the best illustrators of the day: W. Heath Robinson, R. Anning Bell, and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.<\/p>\n Portrait of Edmund Dulac by the celebrated Bavarian photographer Emil Otto Hopp\u00e9 (1878-1972). This version was used as the frontispiece to a catalogue of an exhibition of Dulac\u2019s water-colour drawings, published by Scott & Fowles, New York, in 1916.<\/em><\/p>\n Edmond Dulac had arrived in London in 1904; French anglophile, born in 1882 in Toulouse, where he studied law (graduating with a law degree in 1902), he chose to pursue drawing and painting, studying at the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts from 1900 to 1903 and discovering the work of Beardsley, Burne-Jones, Morris and others of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. He attended the Acad\u00e9mie Julien in Paris the following year, where he so affected English fashion he was given the sobriquet \u201cL\u2019Anglais\u201d. After a surprisingly brief marriage to Alice May de Marni, an American thirteen years his senior, he moved to England, anglicized his first name to Edmund, and settled in London.<\/p>\n Dulac quickly established his reputation. A first commission, sixty illustrations for an edition of Jane Eyre,<\/i> published by J. M. Dent, was followed by regular contributions to Pall Mall<\/i> magazine and other publications. He formed a relationship with the Leicester Gallery, who exhibited and sold his illustrations, which were simultaneously published by Hodder & Stoughton. \u00a0Books followed swiftly: Stories from The Arabian Nights<\/i> in 1907, with 50 color illustrations; an edition of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest<\/i> in 1908, with 40 color illustrations; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam<\/i> in 1909, with 20 color images; The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales<\/i> in 1910; Stories from Hans Christian Andersen<\/i> in 1911; The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe<\/i> in 1912, with 28 color images and a handful of pen and ink drawings. Limited deluxe editions were bound in vellum and signed by the illustrator. (Once again, images spring to life: Dulac at the openings of his shows, signing books \u00a0and perhaps even doing quick drawings in them \u2013 it all makes his work seem even more alive; the temporality of those gestures measured against the timelessness of the published work itself.)<\/p>\n Although he was a member of the famous London Sketch Club, it seems Dulac preferred more tranquil circles to the boisterous atmosphere at 79 Wells Street. He was the friend of many of his equally illustrious contemporaries, the likes of John Hassall, Arthur Rackham, William Heath Robinson, Charles Ricketts, and Edmund Sullivan, as well as philanthropist and collector Edmund Davis. When he married in 1911, Dulac and his new wife Elsa Arnalice Bignardi, violinist daughter of a professor of singing, moved to one of a group of studios built by Davis in Ladbroke Road. There, they met other artists and performers of the day, including pianist Arthur Rubenstein and writer W. B. Yeats, with whom Dulac formed a lifelong friendship. The two would collaborate on a number of projects, including proposed coinage designs for the Irish Free State. Dulac also designed sets and costumes for Yeats\u2019 play \u201cAt The Hawk\u2019s Well\u201d and composed the incidental music, even taking part in the first performance in 1916.<\/p>\n Dulac saw his contract with Hodder & Stoughton collapse with the outbreak of World War I. Now a British citizen, he contributed to many relief books, including King Albert\u2019s Book<\/em>, for Belgium, Princess Mary\u2019s Gift Book<\/em>, and a book of his own for his native France: Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book for the French Red Cross<\/i> in 1915, which included 20 color images. (King Albert\u2019s Book<\/em> can still be found quite inexpensively; I have a copy I bought decades ago, and have only just found, still with a very tattered jacket, his book for the Red Cross, here in Wellington. I almost value the jacket, with its plea for aid, more than the book itself. Once again, I\u2019m grateful to circumstance that kept it with the book, rather than being discarded. While the book itself might be considered timeless, there is a transient urgency imprinted on the jacket that is very moving and places the book in context.) He also designed posters, stamps and other ephemera for the wartime effort.<\/p>\n Whatever the circumstance, Dulac\u2019s energy and artistic talents seem inexhaustible, and capable of being applied to any endeavour. He designed theatre productions, (Cyrano de Bergerac<\/em> for C. B. Cochran and Phoebus & Pan<\/em> for Thomas Beecham in 1919). He could turn his hand to anything: wallpaper, playing cards, industrial brochures, banknotes, coins (the famous profile of George VI is Dulac\u2019s work), medals and whatever seemed to come his way, as well as continuing on in publishing. It also appears he filled his spare moments with bookbinding, the designing of musical instruments, cutting out stencils and applying his dexterity to an array of other arts and crafts. His work appeared overseas as well; for nearly a quarter-century, from 1924 onwards, he was a contributor to the magazine American Weekly<\/em>.<\/p>\n Divorced in 1923, he lived with author Helen Beauclerk until his death. They fled London in 1939 for Dorset, returning to the capital after the war. His last book commissions were for the Limited Editions Club of America: The Golden Cockerel<\/i> (1950), The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche<\/i> (1951) and Comus<\/i> (1955). Irrepressible Dulac, who died of a heart attack brought on by a too enthusiastic evening of flamenco dancing on May 25, 1953 at the age of seventy. Energy and elegance characterize his life, that same elegance and aristocratic touch characterize his art.<\/p>\n In the Illustrated London News Special Edition Christmas Number 1912, Edmund Dulac illustrations of a different character (Circe, Scheherazade, The Queen of Sheba and Salome) were featured alongside work by Charles Robinson, William Heath Robinson, Warwick Goble, Edward Detmold and Kay Nielsen.<\/em><\/p>\n That \u00e9l\u00e9gance recherch\u00e9e<\/em>, which he undoubtedly brought with him from France, mixed with Japonism and Orientalism that appealed to his Mediterranean character, is such a part of his work that it makes his illustrations for The Bells<\/em> all the more striking. Dulac is anything but gloomy, he has little of the tendency to caricature of Rackham, nothing of the earthiness of Byam Shaw, the solidity of Fortescue-Brickdale, or the nervous pen of Sullivan. He is, despite a life spanning the two World Wars, a fin de si\u00e8cle artist, poised, gracious and ever so slightly distant.<\/p>\n The illustrations for The Bells<\/em> are an excursion, a foray out of the lighter tones and delicate pastels into a far darker world. Of the illustrators of Poe, he stands alone (the same could be said of Gustave Dor\u00e9, whose engravings for The Raven are spectacular and eerie), perhaps by his circumvention of literal interpretation, his reluctance to set a recognizable stage or assume the trappings of a particular period, his erasing of horizons and creation of depth through colours that compose a shallow tapestry but nevertheless open on those infinite spaces of the mind that engulfed Edgar Allan Poe. This is the strange and discrete equipoise of Dulac, allowing us to see his darker side, composed and serene, but balanced on the very edge of the gulf of madness and despair. Dreamlike and unearthly, they are possibly the best illustrations ever done for Poe.<\/p>\n In the \u201cReviews & Notices\u201d section of The Studio <\/i>magazine for December 1912, the following appraisal appeared:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bells and other Poems\u201d. By Edgar Allan Poe. Illustrated by Edmund Dulac. (London; Hodder and Stoughton.)\u00a0 15s. net. \u2013 One opens this book with some curiosity. Mr. Dulac has been one of our most successful illustrators of comedy and fairy tale in colour, he has the lightness, gaiety, and sense of grace which make him very happy in the illustrating of everything where these qualities are required. He is very successful with an eighteenth-century setting, for there is a way in which it might be said that as an artist he descends from Watteau. We find Mr. Dulac in this book departing from the styles most suited to book illustration; and after the fashion of too many illustrators this season, he ventures into complication of colour which does not lend itself to the requirements of a book in the lap. It is strange, too, that this mistake intrudes an air of commonplace in the illustrations, most unexpected in work from this artist. Painting is one art, book embellishment another. Proof is not wanting here that Mr. Dulac is capable of a profound note in design, but few of his designs have a chance against the dye-like colours in which the refinement of his compositions is destroyed. The cover of this volume is delightful in its scheme of gold upon grey, if somewhat dainty for the sombre genius of the poetry it contains.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cDulac had from the very beginning fine imaginative powers, and each group of drawings disclosed greater technical achievements\u00a0 and an unsurpassed versatility. The daintiest draughtsmanship, a delicious humor, an amazing feeling for design, and a positive genius for rich radiant color as applied to the pages of a book, were all coupled with the power to grasp an author\u2019s meaning, and to embody it most happily with the glamor or piquancy which pertained to the various literary works themselves. Indeed, he has frequently added a vein of high poetry to the poetic originals. He should, however, be regarded not as an illustrator, but as an original painter, who uses line merely as an accessory, and each of these little iridescent miniatures which seem to be made of opal dust on mother of pearl, satisfies the demand which Delacroix made upon all paintings, ~~ they are color feasts for the eye.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n So, in a word, whatever qualities his work possesses, and whatever flights of fancy they invite the spectator to take, while they are undimmed by the passage of precisely a century, they have, for me, been enhanced by serendipity and an overlapping of dates, by a brief insight disguised as a lapse, a sort of split-second epiphany of time telescoped and erased. While a century might as well be forever in an individual\u2019s life, I suddenly feel I\u2019ve understood more about the nature of art and illustration for seeing one disappear for that split-second last December.<\/p>\n And, since all this talk of books and pictures has hopefully made you wish to see the pictures themselves, since none of us can have the privilege of attending the opening night at the Leicester Gallery, here they are, with extended captions by Ann Carling, to whom I am terribly grateful, and without whom this newsletter might just have remained a split second of bemusement in December 2012.<\/p>\n Although it is a fleeting daydream relation, a vicarious one-way kinship, it was nevertheless a moment of absence transformed into a split-second sentiment of contact as profound as it was insubstantial. In the same way we might hope, with whatever modest means we possess, that we might inadvertently create such fleeting instants in those future lives we will not see, that we might be made to understand ourselves as single threads in vast tapestries, or single drops in wide rivers, truly taking measure of the diverse infinity of human creation despite the limits of our own participation.<\/p>\n Would that serendipity could bring us to create these points of contact, however brief, far, far more often.<\/p>\n ~~<\/p>\n \u00a0EDMUND DULAC: COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS FOR THE BELLS<\/p>\n \u201cWith me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not \u2013 they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), quoted from his own \u201cPreface to the Poems\u201d, included in numerous editions of his poetry, published both during his lifetime and posthumously.<\/p>\n ~~~<\/p>\n 1, 2 & 3. Illustrations for The Bells<\/p>\n Frontispiece and two further illustrations to the title poem The Bells<\/i>, penned by Poe towards the end of his life, and published posthumously in November 1849. The poem apparently \u201cexamines bell sounds as symbols of four milestones of human experience \u2013 childhood, youth, maturity, and death.”1<\/a><\/sup> It has been suggested2<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0that Poe drew some of his inspiration for this from a visit to Marie Louise Shew, an intimate family friend to whom he dedicated several other poems. There is a much more credible explanation; that the conception of The Bells <\/i>arose from reading G\u00e9nie du Christianisme<\/i> (The Genius of Christianity), by Fran\u00e7ois-Ren\u00e9, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848). In a short chapter, (translated from the original French and) entitled simply Of Bells<\/i>3<\/a><\/sup>, the following excerpt appears: \u201cIt seems to us that were we a poet we should not reject the idea of a bell tolled by spectres in the ancient chapel of the forest, that which religious fear set in motion in our fields to keep off the lightning, or that which was rung at night in certain sea-ports to direct the pilot in his passage among the rocks. On our festivals the lively peals of our bells seemed to heighten the public joy. In great calamities, on the contrary, their voice became truly awful. The hair yet stands erect at the remembrance of those days of murder and conflagration, all vibrating with the dismal noise of the tocsin. Who has forgotten those yells — those piercing shrieks succeeded by intervals of sudden silence, during which was now and then heard the discharge of a musket, some doleful and solitary voice, and above all, the heavy tolling of the alarm-bell, or the clock that calmly struck the hour which had just elapsed?<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n Studying the frontispiece for this book, the first of Dulac\u2019s illustrations for the eponymous poem, it is easy to imagine that he too was familiar with these very words, so deeply evocative when read in his native tongue.4<\/a><\/sup> He vividly conveys the visualization of\u00a0 \u201c\u2026cette cloche agit\u00e9e par les fant\u00f4mes dans la vieille chapelle de la for\u00eat\u2026..<\/i>\u201d as clearly as it echoes Poe\u2019s own verses:\u00a0 \u201c — They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone — They are neither man nor woman — They are neither brute nor human — They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls;\u2026.\u201d \u00a0<\/i>\u00a0Dulac\u2019s ghoul is a more metropolitan manifestation, with his death-blanched face and swirling mantle. The softly drifting hues of the second illustration reflect the \u201cbalmy air of night<\/i>\u201d. In an image of mysterious and unearthly beauty, a flight of formless angels streams heavenward on curved and coloured wings that cast an opaque cloud across latticed windows, behind which a faded filigree of foliage trails across the pale moon. The third illustration returns to the ghoulish bell-ringers, and the voices of the bells themselves, \u201cthe melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan.\u201d <\/i>Those voices are given ghastly shape; heavy dust clouds twisting into fantastically contorted faces, emblematic of \u201cthe moaning and the groaning of the bells.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n 4. Annabel Lee<\/p>\n The lyric poem, Annabel Lee<\/i>, thought by many to be in memory of his wife Virginia, who died in 1847, was published in The New York Tribune<\/i> two days after Poe\u2019s own death in October 1849. This poem has been cited as an example of \u201chis sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women (that) inspired his most touching lyrics.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n \u201cIt was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;\u2026.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Dulac executed a Renaissance-like figure in the foreground, with a curiously flattened profile. Her hair, and the flowing simplicity of her costume, together with the blocks of colour representative of rocks and trees, seem somehow reminiscent both of early Italian frescoes, and a Pre-Raphaelite rendering of Dante\u2019s beloved Beatrice, draped in the shimmering satin of her shawl. The looming citadel perched on the cliffs in the background bears some resemblance to a medieval hill town built long ago of smooth golden stone.<\/p>\n 5. Sonnet ~ Silence<\/p>\n Illustration for Sonnet ~ Silence<\/i>, a poem composed by Poe in 1839. The writer and storyteller Andrew Lang (1844-1912) described the poet as \u201cthe singer of rare hours of languor, when the soul is\u2026.inclined to listen, as it were, to the echo of a lyre from behind the hills of death.<\/i>\u201d6<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Dulac stirs the faint and distant echo that \u201cdwells in lonely places<\/i>\u201d, his mournful minstrel\u2019s lyre transmuted into the broken strings of a harp let slip by the desolate figure stretched out upon the barren ground beneath, \u201clike a dying musical note<\/i>.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n 6. The Raven<\/p>\n Illustration for The Raven<\/i>, one of Poe\u2019s most renowned poems, published in 1845. Dulac depicts the deep gloom of the despairing and grief-stricken protagonist, longing for his \u201clost Lenore<\/i>\u201d, by using those most sombre tones described by The Studio <\/i>critic as \u201cdye-like\u201d, <\/i>and presumably representing the lines: Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.\u201d<\/i>\u00a0 But these shadowy and dismal hues reflect an aura of despondency in keeping with the mood of the poem, and comparable in tone to the engravings of Gustave Dor\u00e9 (1832-1883) for the same subject, which were published during the year following his death. The long shadows, the subdued furnishings, and the drabness of the mourner\u2019s clothing, are only offset by the lightness of the lady\u2019s portrait in its golden frame above the fireplace, where a further dreariness is evoked by the cold and empty grate.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n