An Original Watercolour for Cinderella
Whereupon She Instantly Desired Her Partner to Lead Her to the King and Queen An Original Watercolour for Cinderella
1910.
A large original ink and watercolour painting on artist's board which illustrates the story of Cinderella, in Dulac's 1910 gift book, The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales. 317 x 259 mm. Signed and dated lower right ("Edmund Dulac 10"). In fine and unfaded condition.
An exceptional watercolour from what is generally regarded as Dulac's finest work.
"Mr Dulac's illustrations are, of course, the reason of this beautiful book's [Sleeping Beauty and Other Fair Tales] being. Mr Dulac, like Mr Rackham, has a genius for taking the classics of childhood and giving them a new interest for old readers. Children will probably object that he does not really illustrate the stories, but merely uses them as a sort of screen upon which to throw his magic arrangements of bright and moony colours" (The English Review).
A review of the Leicester Galleries exhibition stated that "in... Dulac's watercolour illustrations to fairy tales... there is the same feeling for harmonious colour and decorative composition which has always distinguished his art" (The Academy).
In his study of Dulac, Colin White specifically compared this illustration with "two other watercolours of similar encounters between lovers, drawn in 1912 and 1913 respectively, by Hugh Thomson and Kay Nielsen". Ultimately, White concluded that "each illustrator has an entirely different approach; each in his own way succeeds admirably", but in Dulac, "penwork is used mainly to define figures and objects, and it is the colour that is an essential element in modelling and in atmospheric effect" (White, p. 47).
PROVENANCE: Exhibited at Leicester Galleries, Nov-Dec 1907, no. 50; Sheffield City Art Gallery, Nov 1982 - May 1983, no. 15; Colin White (Collector and biographer of Dulac and Jessie King).
LITERATURE: The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales Edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1910), p. 64.
Stock ID: 45497
£60,000.00
