Venise

Born in Toulouse, Dulac studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 1900-1903, where he first came across the drawings and paintings of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), and William Morris (1834-1896). A committed Anglophile, and fascinated by their work, particularly illustrations, he moved to England in 1904, where he quickly gained commissions for illustrations for books and magazines including The Arabian Nights (1907) and The Tempest (1908). The present watercolour is one of four executed to illustrate Alfred de Musset’s (1810-1857) poem Venise in the Christmas 1912 edition of the magazine L’Illustration. The other three drawings used to illustrate the poem depicted a woman getting ready for a masked ball, a pair of lovers in a gondola accompanied by a musician, and a scene of masked figures in the Piazza San Marco. The present drawing, in which a young woman in a swirling cloak looks out for her lover along a canal in the moonlight, was captioned with the stanza ‘Ah! Maintenant plus d’une/ Attend, au clair de lune,/ Quelque jeune muguet,/ L’oreille au guet.’ The female model for all four was the artist’s wife, the violinist Elsa Bignardi.