Venise: The Carnival, St Mark's, Venice

Details

EDMUND DULAC (BRITISH 1882-1953)
Venise: The Carnival, St Mark's, Venice
signed 'Edmund/ Dulac' (lower left)
pencil and watercolour heightened with bodycolour on paper
12 1/8 x 9 ¾ in. (30.8 x 24.8 cm.)

Literature

'Venise, quatre aquarelles d’Edmund Dulac pour la poésie d’Alfred de Musset’, L’Illustration, Christmas 1912, unpaginated (p. 453).
C. White, Edmund Dulac, London, 1976, p. 56.

Special notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. This lot has been imported from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

This watercolour is one of a series of four drawings used to illustrate the poem Venise by Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), published in the special Christmas issue of the magazine L’Illustration in December 1912. In each of the illustrations the artist's wife, Elsa Bignardi, is the model, dressing for a masked ball, waiting for her lover in an archway beside the water, masked in a group of figures in the present drawing, and in the final work, reclining with her lover in a gondola. These are some of the last of Dulac's works using the distinctive rich dark blue tonality we see here.

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