Page:Catalogue of an exhibition of water-colour drawings and other original works by Edmund Dulac.pdf/8

 further orders, and ever since he has been delighting us each year with a new sheaf of works, remarkable for their beauty of composition, delicacy of clear, limpid colour, and conciseness of drawing.

Shakespeare's Tempest, the Rubaiyat, the Sleeping Beauty, the Tales of Poe and Hans Christian Anderson, Princess Badoura and Sinbad are the principal works down to 1915. At first, Rackam was his rival, one indeed, whose drawing seemed to have a more personal inspiration. Dulac's talents, however, developed very rapidly. He soon showed distinctive originality, and the debt which he owed to the English artist soon became negligible. Dulac had from the very beginning finer imaginative powers, and each group of drawings disclosed greater technical achievements and an unsurpassed versatility. The daintiest draughtsmanship, a delicious humour, an amazing feeling for design, and a positive genius for rich radiant colour as applied to the pages of a book, were all coupled with the power to grasp an author's meaning, and to embody it most happily with the glamour or piquancy which pertained to the various literary works themselves. Indeed, he has frequently added a vein of high poetry 5