Edmund Dulac’s In the Kingdom of the Pearl

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, Léonard 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 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, 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…