Biographies

Edmund Dulac (1882 – 1953) He was born in Toulouse, France. His artistic bent manifested itself early and drawings exist from his early teens. Many of these early efforts are watercolors, a medium he would favor through most of his life. He studied law at the University of Toulouse for two years while attending classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He left law school and enrolled full-time in the Ecole. He won the 1901 and 1903 Grand Prix for his paintings submitted to the annual competitions. A scholarship took him to Paris and the Académie Julien where he stayed for three weeks. That same year (1904) he left for London and the start of a meteoric career. Dulac’s first book assignment was for the publisher J.M. Dent’s collected works of the Bronte sisters. It’s a testament to Dulac’s skills that he, a 22-year-old, unpublished foreigner, was given a commission for 60 color illustrations. An interesting aspect of these early illustrations is that they don’t depend on an ink line to hold the color. especially and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Robinsons tended to approach the new color medium almost as a colored ink drawing. Dulac, though capable of pen and ink work, was primarily a painter and used the new technology’s ability to reproduce exact tones to let the color hold the shape and define the object. This is one of the effects of Dulac’s timing. The color separation process was just at the exact moment he arrived and he never had to deal with the old-fashioned necessity of an ink line bounding the color to hide misregistration. Rackham perfected