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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, L\u00e9onard 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<\/em><\/a> 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<\/em><\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Elsewhere on { feuilleton } Previously on { feuilleton } 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, L\u00e9onard 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. … Continue reading “Edmund Dulac’s In the Kingdom of the Pearl”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Edmund Dulac's In the Kingdom of the Pearl","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,48],"tags":[286,1481],"class_list":["post-29965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-illustrators","tag-edmund-dulac","tag-leonard-rosenthal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-7Nj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29966,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29965\/revisions\/29966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"dulac02.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/dulac02.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u2022 Edmund Dulac\u2019s Princesse Badourah<\/a>
\n\u2022 Edmund Dulac\u2019s illustrated Poe<\/a>
\n\u2022 Edmund Dulac\u2019s Sinbad the Sailor<\/a>
\n\u2022 Edmund Dulac\u2019s Tanglewood Tales<\/a>
\n\u2022 Edmund Dulac\u2019s Tempest<\/a>
\n\u2022 Edmund Dulac\u2019s Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"