Wondrous Worlds of the Night
From Scheherazade to Andersen and Edgar Allan Poe
Dulac displayed an artistic interest from an teenage age, with his favourite medium, watercolours, being established in early years. Typically, his illustrations from The Arabian Nights (1907), Shakespeare's The Tempest (1908), Hans Andersen (1911) and Stawell (1916) do not rely upon an ink line to hold the colour as he approached the relatively new colour printing medium as a coloured ink drawing. In 1913, the mellow, romantic blues that Dulac had tended towards a brighter palette and more oriental style that characterised his interpretation of fairy tales and legends for the remainder of his life. Throughout the 1930s , Dulac's artwork depicting myths and legends was supported by a number of commissions arising from the United States and included those suites of published in Gods and Mortals in Love as well as The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche and The Masque of Comus.