{illustrators} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Edmund Dulac’s In the Kingdom of the Pearl

An unusual commission for Edmund Dulac, being a work of non-fiction published in France in 1920, with a British edition following in the same year. The author, Léonard Rosenthal, was a French diamond merchant who wrote a handful of books intended to celebrate and promote his line of business, of which this was the first. In the Kingdom of the Pearl is a history of the pearl-fishing trade and the use of pearls in jewellery, decoration and storytelling. I can’t vouch for the text but the book itself is a beautiful production, with fine colour printing, and a variety of aquarian embellishments throughout. It’s common in illustrated books for the decorative details to repeat themselves but Dulac has drawn a different fishy capital for the opening page of each chapter. His colour illustrations continue the flattened style he was using in Tanglewood Tales, only here the paintings look as though he may have been aiming at the appearance of Mughal miniatures. This is a period of Dulac’s work that’s often overlooked in favour of the Rackham-like illustrations he was producing earlier in his career.

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Kay Nielsen’s Book of Death

Disconsolate.

More unknown Kay Nielsen, although “little-known” would be more accurate since the sombre nature of these drawings has made them popular among the image-hoarders in the Tumblr labyrinth. Nielsen created the series known as The Book of Death around 1910 when he was an art student studying in Paris, the “Book” being a cycle of ten (or more?) drawings that chart the progress of one of those Pierrots who we find mourning a lost love. The series was exhibited in London but wasn’t published in full during Nielsen’s lifetime, although a couple of the drawings did see print a few years after their completion. The Illustrated London News published one of them in 1913 when Nielsen’s work was showcased in the magazine’s Christmas special; two more appeared a year later in The Studio where Nielsen’s work was analysed by Marion Hepworth Dixon.

Consolation.

Information about the series is so scant my cursory searches haven’t been able to locate a reliable list of the pictures, or any idea of the order they might follow. The Studio, for example, mentions a picture labelled “Omen” but doesn’t say what the picture looks like. What you see here is a guess at the labelling and an attempt at an order. The problem is complicated by the fact that Nielsen was drawing other Pierrot figures at this time so I can’t be certain that all the pictures are part of the series. They are all Nielsen’s work, however.

Desolation (or Solitude).

Of greater certainty is the way the series differs from Nielsen’s later illustrations, showing the artist proceeding in an opposite direction to that of his contemporary, Harry Clarke. Where Clarke’s illustration work evolved from delicate fairy-tale scenes to the horrors in Poe, Goethe and Swinburne, Nielsen abandoned fin-de-siècle morbidity for his meticulous blending of the art styles of the East and West. Marion Hepworth Dixon makes a great deal of the influence of Beardsley on Nielsen’s early drawings, something that’s most evident in his black-and-white art here and elsewhere. In 1910 he was still developing his own style so there may be other influences at work—Sidney Sime, perhaps—but without further research it’s difficult to say.

Yearning.

The Vision.

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Kay Nielsen’s Arabian Nights

Prologue.

Last week a Kay Nielsen illustration passed through my RSS feed, a picture I thought for a moment I hadn’t seen before. A quick search revealed that the illustration is in fact present in a book on my shelves, The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977), one of the series of art books co-published by Pan and Ballantine in the 1970s. A selection of Nielsen’s illustrations had appeared in the series two years earlier in a book simply titled Kay Nielsen; the arrival of a follow-up made the Dane the only featured artist aside from Frank Frazetta to be the subject of multiple volumes.

Prologue.

Nielsen’s illustrations in the second book were labelled “unknown” because they hadn’t been printed before, despite being commissioned for a new Danish translation of The Thousand and One Nights by Arthur Christensen. Hildegarde Flanner, a friend of the Nielsens when they were living in Los Angeles in the 1940s, writes in an introductory “elegy” that Nielsen worked on the illustrations from 1918 to 1922, but publication of the book was abandoned as a result of the economic climate in post-war Denmark. There were further difficulties later on. When Nielsen died in 1957 the illustrations still hadn’t been published. Nielsen’s widow, Ulla, passed them on to Hildegarde Flanner and Frederick Monhoff who subsequently tried to place them with museums in the USA and Denmark. None of the institutions they contacted were interested, an unthinkable situation today.

Prologue.

There’s more of an adult tone to Nielsen’s Arabian Nights than there is in his earlier works, a quality which suits the material but which may explain why they had to wait until the 1970s to see print. Simplified versions of the tales of Aladdin and Sin(d)bad have seen The Thousand and One Nights continually miscast as children’s fiction when the original stories were intended for adults; Scheherazade invents a new story each night to save herself from execution in the morning. Nielsen’s illustrations bring the stories closer to their origin while also maintaining the influence of Persian art on the style of his drawings.

The Tale of the Little Hunchback.

The copies you see here show the colour plates alone but Nielsen also created a number of monochrome vignettes and other pieces to be used as decoration elsewhere in the book. The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen doesn’t reprint the stories so has to pad out its pages by combining details from the colour plates with the ink borders. More recently the illustrations were reprinted in one of Taschen’s expensive editions which is closer to Nielsen’s original plan for the book.

The Tailor’s Tale of the Lame Young Man.

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Tadami Yamada’s weird covers

Earlier this year when I wrote about Tadami Yamada’s illustrations for William Hope Hodgson I mentioned the existence of books by other authors that were published along with the Hodgson as part of a series. Kokusho Kankōkai published ten of these books from 1976 to 1977, most of them being collections of short horror fiction by European and American authors, with the series as a whole being referred to as the “Dracula” editions. Yamada painted the covers and provided interior illustrations for eight of the books, including, as I suspected earlier, a Lovecraft collection. I was hoping I might be able to find copies of his interiors for the Lovecraft but so far nothing has turned up, Yamada’s web pages only featuring illustrations from the Hodgson and Henry S. Whitehead collections. Searching elsewhere is complicated by a number of factors such as the age of the books, their being Japanese publications, and the sheer quantity of Lovecraft-related material to sift through.

Yamada says that his illustrations weren’t appreciated by readers who were expecting more typical horror imagery. This doesn’t surprise me given the Surrealist tenor of his work as a whole. The Hodgson illustrations are relatively orthodox but many of his other book illustrations from this period are collages that resemble the simpler things Max Ernst was doing in his collage novels. Collage is also evident on the “Dracula” covers, together with decalcomania, another Surrealist technique visible in the Hodgson illustrations. These books are a minor diversion in Yamada’s wide-ranging career but, as is often the case with Asian publications, none of them are currently listed at ISFDB. I’d still like to see his Lovecraft illustrations, if only to assuage my curiosity.

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Weekend links 823

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“

• Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from the CD release. (Thanks to Francis for the tip!)

• The spring catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: State Of Matter by Dobrawa Czocher; Plague Dogs by The Heartwood Institute.

• “Why we made a film about Mark Fisher called We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher.”

• At Colossal: “Ambiguity reigns in Olaf Hajek’s mysterious illustrations”.

• At Public Domain Review: Monet’s early caricatures (ca. late 1850s).

• At the BFI: George Orwell, film critic.

• The Strange World of…Ladytron.

• The Plague (1967) by Scott Walker | A Plague Of Angels (2007) by Earth | The Plague (2014) by Cosmic Ground