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‘We would gallop through Africa’ from A Dreamer’s Tales. 

More from the book scans at Archive.org. Lord Dunsany was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany and a writer of a number of fantasy tales beginning with The Gods of Pegana in 1905. His work is notable these days for having been a huge influence on the early stories of HP Lovecraft who once divided his literary output into his Poe pieces and his Dunsany pieces. Dunsany found an ideal illustrator in Sidney Sime who started out as a Beardsley pasticheur but developed his own slightly comical variant on the kind of exotica favoured by Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen.

Of the Dunsany/Sime books, Archive.org has The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912) and Tales of Wonder (1916). These stories are frequently too whimsical for my tastes—I’ve never been very keen on Lovecraft’s Dunsany pieces either—but they’re still worth a look for anyone interested in the lighter side of 20th century fantasy. Unfortunately the picture scans don’t do much justice to Sime’s washes so the examples here are taken from Thames & Hudson’s Sidney Sime: Master of the Mysterious (1980).

‘The City of Never’ from The Book of Wonder.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists