Page:Catalogue of an exhibition of water-colour drawings and other original works by Edmund Dulac.pdf/7

 Aubrey Beardsley, as a musician, his holidays were spent copying Japanese prints which he first saw in a collection brought to Toulouse from the East, by a cultivated merchant. Stage fright at an annual conservatory examination ended his musical career and then, conforming to his family's wishes, he began the study of law at the university. Art, however, meant more to him than codes or pandects, and in 1901, when he was nineteen years old, he decided to become a painter.

The school in which he began his studies was badly organized, and the pupils were left more or less to themselves. Dulac won the offered prizes with ease, and a municipal scholarship, though never paid, served as an excuse for going to Paris in 1903. Arriving at the capital, he was enrolled for six months at the Julian Academy, but he actually studied there for only three or four weeks. Like most of the students he was obliged to earn his living, and he began his professional career as an artist by making covers and magazine illustrations. England was the most lucrative field for such work, and Dulac drifted to London where in 1907 a group of his water colour drawings were used to illustrate the Arabian Nights. The instantaneous success of this book led to

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