Page:Catalogue of an exhibition of water-colour drawings and other original works by Edmund Dulac.pdf/10

 which Scheherazade wove for her august lord beside the scented fountains, need a jewelled commentator, and Dulac alone possesses the necessary gifts. The tremendous advance which his art has recently made becomes obvious, if we compare the early paintings for, let us say Poe's Tales, with the recent plates in his Red Cross gift book. "The development should have been even more rapid" Dulac tells us, "but all the drawings for a particular book must be more or less in the same spirit and at the same level, and the nature of such work does not allow progress to go beyond the step forward made with the first illustration of a series." In the "Fairy Book of the Allies" (1916), however, each story means a new racial tradition and a wholly different inspiration, and the result is a unique commentary on the artist's resourcefulness and wonderful power of assimilation. In each painting he magically develops what appears superficially to be a new style, peculiarly appropriate to the nationality of the particular story, but ever remaining Dulac's own. It would be too much to expect to find him guiltless of the charge of borrowing, but the critics who are not satisfied unless they are tracing influences, will be faced here by a 7