What Edmund Dulac Chose to Paint and Illustrate

Dulac is remembered for a handful of famous books, but his subjects ran wider than fairy tales. Here is what he returned to, book after book and decade after decade.

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The short answer

Edmund Dulac focused on literary and fantasy subjects. He illustrated The Arabian Nights around 1907, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His recurring subjects were exotic storybook worlds, elegant women in flowing robes, and dreamlike landscapes rendered in delicate watercolour.

The Fairy Tale and Storybook Core

Dulac built his reputation on illustrated books, and the subjects he chose came from literature rather than from life. His breakthrough came with a large illustrated edition of stories from The Arabian Nights, published in the first decade of the twentieth century. The book gave him the material he would keep returning to, distant courts, sultans and princesses, enchanted gardens, and nights lit by lanterns rather than by daylight.

Other commissions followed the same path. He illustrated Shakespeare's The Tempest, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Each offered what he wanted, a text with atmosphere and a world already half imaginary. Readers unfamiliar with his name often recognise the images first, because these books stayed in print and in circulation for decades. Anyone drawn to fantasy illustration will find his range covered in more detail in our guide to buying his work as a gift for a fantasy art gift.

Recurring Figures and Motifs

Across the books, certain figures appear again and again. Women in loose, flowing robes dominate his pages, often standing alone, often looking away from the viewer. He dressed them in fabrics that seem to move, and he gave them the pale, elongated elegance that marked the decorative style of the period. Men appear less often, and when they do they are usually sultans, poets, or figures of authority within a story.

His settings matter as much as his people. Dulac favoured interiors with domes and arches, terraces at dusk, and landscapes reduced to a few bands of colour. He worked mainly in watercolour, building form from soft washes and fine line, which suits the dreamlike register of his subjects. A short list of the motifs worth knowing:

Dulac's recurring subjects

Princesses and isolated female figures in flowing orientalist dress
Palace interiors with arches, tiles, and hanging lamps
Nightscape and twilight scenes built from deep blues and golds
Storybook creatures and enchanted vessels drawn with decorative pattern

Beyond the Books, Portraiture and Design

Dulac was not only a book illustrator. He painted portraits, designed theatre costumes and sets, and later produced stamps and banknote designs during and after the wars. These commissions used the same decorative instincts, but the subjects shifted toward real people and public imagery rather than literary fantasy. The later work is less often reproduced, which is why the storybook images dominate what people know.

For anyone assessing his output, the honest summary is this. Dulac's subjects were chosen to serve atmosphere. He rarely painted plain reality, plain landscape, or plain still life. Where another illustrator of his generation chased realism, Dulac chased the exotic and the imagined, and that choice defines every page he made. If you are weighing how his images behave on a wall, the practical questions of scale are handled separately choosing the right print size.

Dulac painted the world books promised, not the world readers lived in.

Book	Subject matter	Typical imagery
The Arabian Nights	Eastern tales and romance	Palaces, princesses, night scenes
The Tempest	Shakespeare's island fantasy	Spirits, storms, enchanted shores
Andersen's fairy tales	Northern folk stories	Wintry scenes, small figures, pathos
The Rubaiyat	Persian verse and contemplation	Gardens, vessels, dusk and stars

Major illustrated books and their subjects

Key takeaways

Dulac's subjects came from literature, chiefly fairy tales, Shakespeare, and Persian verse.
The Arabian Nights illustrations established the exotic storybook world he kept returning to.
His most common figures are solitary women in flowing robes within palace or twilight settings.
He also worked as a portraitist and designer, though the illustrated books remain his core subject matter.

Related questions

Did Edmund Dulac paint anything other than book illustrations?

Yes. He painted portraits, designed costumes and sets for the theatre, and produced stamp and banknote designs in his later career. These works share his decorative style but cover real people and public subjects rather than literary fantasy. They are reproduced far less often than his book plates.

What medium did Dulac use for his illustrations?

He worked primarily in watercolour, often combined with fine pen line. The medium suits his subjects, since soft washes handle twilight skies, flowing fabric, and dreamlike atmosphere better than opaque paint. Most reproductions of his work derive from these watercolour originals.

Why are Dulac's subjects described as orientalist?

His most famous images draw on imagined Middle Eastern and Persian settings drawn from texts like The Arabian Nights and the Rubaiyat. European illustrators of his generation treated these settings as decorative fantasy rather than observed reality, and Dulac's palaces, robes, and gardens follow that convention.

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