Edmund Dulac, Watercolour Wizard

The French illustrator Edmund Dulac (1882-1953) lived in London most of his life. At home with his wife, he enjoyed dressing up Arabian-nights style: artists tend to be a bit peculiar, especially, it seems, if they happen to live in Britain. (William Blake liked to potter about his garden naked and took drawing lessons from an alien...)

In miraculously delicate watercolours, in a style the hovered between Pre-Raphaelite etiolation, the dark stirrings of Symbolism, chinoiserie and medieval Persian miniatures, Dulac painted all manner of exquisite princesses, diaphanous mermaids; he lovingly rendered the swarthy glamour of exotic beauties, and the myriad genies, panthers, monsters, crones and heroic youths who inevitably attend them in fairy tales.

An antidote for the po-faced eternal present of contemporary vulgarity!