Edmund Dulac – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

Mother West Wind (1918).

The first thought which comes to mind when looking at these beautiful prints is to wonder why American artist Bertha Lum isn’t more well-known, she had a particularly fondness for fluid lines and swirling arabesques as in the example above. There is at least a wealth of detail about her career online, and her biography shows her to be far more than a careful pasticheur like Edmund Dulac and others. She travelled to Japan specially to learn printmaking, and her later works were produced in collaboration with Japanese artisans. No surprise to see she was attracted to the works of Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), another Westerner who did much to introduce the rest of the world to Japanese folklore—especially the ghost stories—during the late Victorian era.

The Dragon King and his Bride (1924).

• Four pages of catalogued works at Bertha-lum.org
• Biography page in English and a reference gallery

Spider Woman (1936).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Boy Who Drew Cats
• More Arabian Nights

More Arabian Nights

Louis Rhead (1916).

Continuing from the weekend’s book discovery, a browse at the Internet Archive reveals many scanned editions of the Arabian Nights. No surprise given the enduring popularity of the stories, and no surprise either that the texts are of variable quality, most of them diluted from the earthy and inventive originals to the status of the mildest fairy tales. The exotic settings make for some fine illustrations, however, a selection of which follow. Edmund Dulac’s edition of Sindbad the Sailor is a typically masterful adaptation by one of the great illustrators.

HJ Ford (1898).

Walter Paget (1907?).

The Brothers Dalziel (1865).

Edmund Dulac (1914).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

Poe at 200

Poe by Harry Clarke.

Happy birthday Edgar Allan Poe, born two hundred years ago today. I nearly missed this anniversary after a busy weekend. Rather than add to the mountain of praise for the writer, I thought I’d list some favourites among the numerous Poe-derived works in different media.

Illustrated books
For me the Harry Clarke edition of 1919 (later reworked with colour plates) has always been definitive. Many first-class artists have tried their hand at depicting Poe’s stories and poems, among them Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham, W. Heath Robinson and Edmund Dulac; none complements the morbid atmosphere and florid prose as well as Clarke does. And if it’s horror you need, Clarke’s depiction of The Premature Burial could scarcely be improved upon.

Honourable mention should be made of two less well-known works, Wilfried Sätty’s The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe (1976) and Visions of Poe (1988) by Simon Marsden. I wrote about Sätty’s collage engravings in Strange Attractor 2, and Sätty’s style was eminently suited to Poe’s work. Marsden’s photographs of old castles and decaying mansions are justly celebrated but in book form often seem in search of a subject beyond a general Gothic spookiness or a recounting of spectral anecdotes. His selection of Poe stories and poems is a great match for the photos, one of which, a view of Monument Valley for The Colloquy of Monos and Una, was also used on a Picador cover for Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Recordings
These are legion but among the outstanding one-off tracks I’d note two poems set to music, Dream Within a Dream from Propaganda‘s 1985 album, A Secret Wish, and The Lake by Antony & The Johnsons. The latter appeared on the landmark Golden Apples of the Sun compilation and also on Antony’s own The Lake EP.

Among the full-length works, Hal Willner’s 1997 2-CD collection Closed on Account of Rabies features lengthy readings set to music from a typically eclectic Willner line-up: Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galás, Gavin Friday, Dr John, Deborah Harry, Jeff Buckley (one of the last recordings before his untimely death) and Gabriel Byrne. Byrne’s reading of The Masque of the Red Death is tremendous and the whole package is decked out in Ralph Steadman graphics.

Antony Hegarty appears again on another double-disc set, Lou Reed’s The Raven (2003), a very eccentric approach to Poe which I suspect I’m in the minority in enjoying as much as I do. An uneven mix of songs and reading/performances, Reed updates some Poe poems while others are presented straight and to often stunning effect by (among others) Willem Defoe, Steve Buscemi, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Amanda Plummer and Elizabeth Ashley.

Films
Once again, there’s too many films but The Masque of the Red Death (1964) has always been my favourite of the Roger Corman adaptations, not least for the presence of Jane Asher, Patrick Magee and (behind the camera) Nicolas Roeg. I wrote last May about the animated version of The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA. That adaptation, with narration by James Mason, is still on YouTube so if you haven’t seen it yet you can celebrate Poe’s anniversary by watching it right now.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

I was rather aggrieved a few weeks ago when I found a copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) at the Internet Archive. Nice to find a free copy of a rare book but the grievance came as a result of an intention to write something about its illustrator, Franklin Booth (1874–1948), and post a picture or two. It turns out that the scanned copy available is complete but all the colour plates have been removed, probably stolen during its career as a library volume. Riley’s story is a piece of light fantasy which might well have been forgotten by now if it wasn’t for Booth’s incredible illustrations; as a result it’s the illustrations that make the book worth seeking out.

Booth’s penmanship from Franklin Booth: American Illustrator.

Happily, and by coincidence, Mr Door Tree at the essential Golden Age Comic Book Stories has uploaded scans of his own in the past few days. Beautiful stuff and easily the equal of Booth’s contemporaries in Britain such as Charles and William Heath Robinson, Edmund Dulac et al. Booth’s colour work resembles similar watercolour book illustration of the period but his black & white work was quite unique, being done in a pen style derived from his boyhood interest in engraved magazine illustrations. His careful use of hatched lines went on to influence later American illustrators including Roy Krenkel, Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson and others. Golden Age Comic Book Stories has an earlier posting featuring one of Booth’s pen drawings here and a page of Mucha-esque women here.

• Bud Plant’s Franklin Booth page
• Franklin Booth: American Illustrator

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

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

More from the book scans at the Internet Archive. 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.

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

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

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