Edmund Dulac’s Fairyland
The two series featured here are Enchanting Fairyland Lovers from 1932 and Beauty and the Beast from 1937. The Fairyland series was an immediate success, with the very art deco ‘Sleeping Beauty’ picture reproduced by The Studio magazine and sold as an art print for their series of British illustrators. Villeroy and Bosch reproduced the entire series in decorative plates in 1976. Dulac was able to update several of his earlier paintings in this series, with ‘Ivan and the Chestnut Horse’ first appearing in Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book of 1916 and ‘The Bird Feng’ from his Picture Book for the French Red Cross of 1915.
Dulac has illustrated Beauty and the Beast earlier as part of The Sleeping Beauty and Other Tales Told from the Old French by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch issued by Hodder and Stoughton in 1910. None of these themes were repeated in the American Weekly series, but the frontispiece for the book was’ The Prince and Sleeping Beauty’ painted during his art nouveau period.
What readers are saying about Edmund Dulac’s Fairyland:
I was surprised by the variety in the illustrations, and spent quite a bit of time lingering over them. Some of those facial expressions will haunt for days to come, I just know it. — Read A License To Quill’s full review here.