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Persian Style, Christian Subject: Edmund Dulac’s Rendition of the Adoration of the Magi Using Persian Painting TechniquesHeadline piece to the conference proceedings of the Symposia Iranica’s First Biennial Graduate Conference on

Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews, to be published by I.B. Tauris (forthcoming).

Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp

Abstract

This paper examines a painted Adoration of the Magi subject entitled Three Wise Men from 1917 by the British illustrator Edmund Dulac (1882-1953). It analyzes the artist’s usage of Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal iconographies to render its Biblical subject in a Persian painting style. The investigation evaluates early interpretations of Persian arts of the book in British scholarly communities during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dulac’s obsession with the Persian “miniature” arts was kindled through friendships with W. B. Yeats, Laurence Binyon, and Edward Denison Ross. Dulac likely encountered Persian art in museums, galleries, and private collections. He surely owned survey books on Indian and Islamic art published between 1903 and 1917, deriving inspiration from reproduced manuscript pages executed for Shah Tahmasp in F. R. Martin’s pioneering The Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India and Turkey published in 1912. Additionally, Dulac likely read academic journals such as the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs reporting on Byzantine, Sasanian, Chinese, and Central Asian influences on the Islamic arts. Persian painting’s appropriation of these different cultural forms might have been part of the style’s appeal for him. Thus, his interest predates the euphoria for Persian art that the 1931 International Exhibition of Persian Art in London instigated, and places him at the fore of Persian art studies in Europe. His scholarly contributions, however, have been entirely overlooked until now. Dulac’s insistence on a global art historical outlook, informed by his knowledge of arts that were marginalized in his day, has much in common with our contemporary preoccupation with cross-cultural exchanges in the history of art. Ahead of his time, Dulac’s conception of art did not resort to the problematic classification scheme of Eastern and Western. Instead he created his own categories premised on ways of looking as opposed to culture or geography. He delineated two strands of art. For him, one was exemplified by Renaissance realism and the other by Persian painting. In his own art practice, Dulac gravitated towards the stylization of Persian painting as opposed to realism. He took on the Persian style and worked fully in its tradition to suit his own subjects, an act that caused his contemporaries and some scholars today to liken him to the sixteenth-century Islamic masters and craftsmen of the book arts themselves.

1

A scene unfolds under a starry night sky. Approximately the same size as a standard sheet

of paper, the watercolor painting on cold press illustration board renders a common Christian

subject (figure 1). It is the Biblical Adoration of the Magi. The bearded African Balthazar garbed

in red carries a censer with wisps of frankincense arising from it, and looks like a Persian

nobleman who walked off the pages of a Safavid manuscript from sixteenth-century Iran (figure

2). The youthful Asian Caspar in yellow clutches a lidded vessel housing myrrh, the serenity of

his features masking the length of his overland journey from the Far East. He has a less distinct

stylistic provenance, but his Asiatic features call to mind the East Asian elements that infiltrated

Ilkhanid and Timurid manuscript arts. The aged European Melchior, garbed in green, resembles

portraits of Shah Jahān, emperor of the Mughals in India (figure 3). He kneels to offer a box

containing gold to the seated infant. But a distracted eye might confuse the Virgin’s larger hands

as additional arms of the child’s own, making Jesus look like a Nataraja: a dancing Shiva from

the Hindu pantheon (figure 4).

The work inserts itself into and diverges from the established iconography of adoring

Magi by European artists popular in the Renaissance. Painted by the British artist Edmund

Dulac, its title is The Three Wise Men and it dates to 1917.1 Notably, the title emphasizes the

Biblical wise men, the three kings, the Magi or Zoroastrian priests of pre-Islamic Persia.2 Dulac

has executed his artwork as if to restore to them their Persianness, but he has rendered his Magi

anachronistically given that the Persian arts of the book came after the Achaemenid and Sasanian

periods in which Zoroastrianism held sway. The Three Wise Men painting came at a significant

moment in the artist’s life in the midst of World War One in which he looked to artistic traditions

derived from other times and places and intensely studied Persian art. In the painting, attention is

clearly diverted from the object of adoration. Baby Jesus has to share the stage. Is this illustration

an Adoration of the Magi subject, or is the work itself the artist’s adulation of the Magi as

Persians, testifying to his admiration for Persian painting? Dulac’s Magi emerged at a time when

he also attended séances and befriended occultists and accused Satanists. How then does one

2

1 The painting is currently in the collection of the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. To date, nothing has been mentioned of this work. Upon seeing it, Dulac’s biographer, Colin White, has stated, “nowhere in my researches over the years have I come across any reference to it.” Private correspondence dated 14 February 2012. Nowhere is it featured in published materials, nor are the details known of its transfer from the artist to New York’s Knoedler Gallery (according to a label on the backing) and in turn to the donor, Kathryn Hurd (born in 1907) who left it to the museum after her death in 1982. The artwork is erroneously titled Epiphania in the catalogue to the Sotheby’s Estate of Kathryn Hurd auction, sale no. 217, from May 1982.

2 The origins of the Biblical Magi being of great debate, contemporary scholarship in Dulac’s day explicitly gave them a Persian provenance. Samuel Kasha Nweeya, Persia: the Land of the Magi or the Home of the Wise Men (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1913).

categorize the painting’s Christian subject and its Persian style when the artist was neither

Christian nor Persian?

Born in France in 1882, Edmund Dulac later became a naturalized English citizen and

lived in London until his death in 1953. He was famous in his day as an illustrator of fairytales

and stories from The Arabian Nights and Persian poetry from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam.3

Dulac’s early works were characterized by watercolor washes and volumetric figures (figure 5),

mirroring his rival in children’s book illustration Arthur Rackham (figure 6). Dulac rendered a

version of the Magi/Three Kings in this darker, early style that was published in a 1912 interview

(figure 7).4 Here his Magi wear the trappings of the exotic and ancient Babylonian dress

including a horned headdress derived from Mesopotamian iconography. Although the surface of

the artwork is two-dimensional, the figures are rendered as three-dimensional. Their facial

features are proportionate and realistic, and Dulac goes to the effort of delineating the wrinkled

brow and hands of his foremost Melchior figure as well as the folds of brocade and velvet

enveloping him.

But that was his early style. A few years later a significant change in his attitude towards

illustration occurred. A trip in 1913 to port cities in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean

brought about a desire for stylistic experimentation that changed the direction of Dulac’s work.5

The journey caused him to brighten his palette and use darker, sinuous outlines. His three-

dimensional work would become flatter, more stylized, geometric, and indebted to Persian

artistic traditions.6 By comparing his two sets of Magi, the 1912 version and the 1917, one can

detect how he later lightened his colors and enclosed them in dark outlines by emulating Persian

paintings colloquially termed miniatures.7 But Dulac’s 1913 voyage was not the only catalyst for

his stylistic turn, and indeed his interest in the arts of other cultures went back to his childhood.

3

3 Dulac was commissioned by the London publisher Hodder and Stoughton for the following titles: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, 1909; Stories from the Arabian Nights, 1907; Sinbad the Sailor and other stories from the Arabian Nights, 1914.

4 Featured in Hugh Stokes, “Edmund Dulac,” Art Chronicle: An Illustrated Journal of the Arts and Crafts 7, no. 90 (April 5, 1912), 229. This same artwork would be titled “Three Kings of Orient” to illustrate the lyrics of the Christmas Carol in Edmund Dulac's picture-book for the French Red Cross from 1916.

5 For more on this trip and its shaping Dulac’s art afterwards, see Mappin Art Gallery, Edmund Dulac, illustrator and designer, 1882-1953: a centenary exhibition (England: Sheffield Printing Services, 1982), 8-9.

6 Ibid., 8.

7 Ibid., 8.

In 1916 he wrote about a transformative experience in which he first encountered the arts

of China and Japan at the age of fourteen: “It was [then] I first came under the influence which

has subconsciously fought out every other that has come to me.”8After some training at the

Toulouse School of Art and the Académie Julian in Paris in 1903,9 “a closer acquaintance with

Chinese and Japanese art, Persian miniatures and later early Greek art definitely removed the

obstacles to the development of early influences.”10 Dulac was known to have delighted in

cultural juxtapositions in art. In his studios he hung Chinese paintings and Japanese prints

showing Europeans in 1860 clothes.11 His dabbling in the arts of many different cultures and

time periods fulfilled a desire to synthesize spirit, form, emotion, and character in art. During the

time he painted The Three Wise Men in 1917, he had confined himself to one branch of art:

Persian manuscript painting.

Some scholars writing about Edmund Dulac have referred to the time period in which he

painted his Three Wise Men as trivia.12 I however posit that the painting came at a significant

moment in the artist’s life in the midst of World War One. This painting marks a visual rupture

between Dulac’s earlier, more naturalistic style, and his later style derived from Persianate book

arts. While the First World War raged, Dulac was looking to artistic traditions derived from other

times and places. Persian painting’s adoption of Byzantine, Sasanian, Chinese, and Central Asian

artistic influences might have been part of the style’s appeal for him. Thus, his interest predates

the euphoria for Persian art that the 1931 International Exhibition of Persian Art in London

instigated,13 and places him at the fore of Persian art studies in Britain. But Dulac’s intellectual

4

8 Letter written by Dulac to Martin Birnbaum, dated October 5, 1916. Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Martin Birnbaum Papers, Microfilm 1023.

9 Dulac’s obituary in The Times claims he spent only three weeks at Julian, “which suggests that he found the teaching there little to his purpose.”

10 Dulac to Martin Birnbaum.

11 R.H. Wilenski, Edmund Dulac: Catalogue of a Memorial Exhibition (London: Leicester Galleries, December 1953).

12 Colin White, Edmund Dulac, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 88.

13 Rizvi and Wood’s studies of the 1931 International Exhibition point out that this event marked the beginning of broader public interest in Persian art and culture, a curiosity Dulac had decades before the show. Kishwar Rizvi, “Art History and the Nation: Arthur Upham Pope and the Discourse on ‘Persian Art’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Muqarnas: History and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the Lands of the Rum (2007), 45-65 and Barry D. Wood, “‘A Glorious Symphony of Pure Form’: The 1931 International Exhibition of Persian Art,” Ars Orientalis 30 (2000), 113–30.

contributions to early interpretations of Persian painting, like his own Adoration of the Magi

painting, have been entirely overlooked until now.14

Meddling in Miniatures

Dulac’s infatuation with Persian miniatures at this time manifests itself in several works

bearing strong resemblance to Persian and Indian manuscripts. Dulac’s 1917 Magi in a flat,

miniature style reject reality and also retreat from it. The two years before he painted them had

been unstable as a result of the wartime economy preventing his carrying out illustrating and

publishing contracts.15 But with this financial stultification also came artistic freedom. In a letter

written to Martin Birnbaum from October 5, 1916, Dulac lamented the limits imposed by

commissions and book illustrations on personal stylistic development: I would consider myself in a more fortunate position, if circumstances allowed me to try in succession an [sic] many different experiments as I wished. The three books done since 1912 are in progress towards a

better method of synthesis. Though confined to one branch of art at present I feel anxious to develop ambitions in every possible field of aesthetic activity. 16

Dulac’s illustrations for the book Tanglewood Tales were carried out between 1916-1918,

marking “a watershed in his attitude towards illustration ...[using Persian art] to express a

narrative point in terms of surface as opposed to the Western attitude of using the illustration as a

window.”17 Dulac’s artistic experimentation continued in illustrations for the book The Kingdom

of the Pearl published in 1920 (figure 8).18 Persian influence is also evident in a 1916 caricature

of his friend Sir Edward Denison Ross (figure 9): director of the London School of Oriental

Studies, professor of Middle Eastern languages and history, and later director of the 1931 Second

5

14 Robert Hillenbrand gives a useful overview of these early interpretations in “Western Scholarship on Persian Painting before 1914: Collectors, Exhibitions and Franco-German Rivalry,” After One Hundred Years: the 1910 Exhibition ‘Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst’ Reconsidered, eds. A. Lermer and A. Shalem (Leiden and Boston, 2010), 201-29.

15 The onset of WWI cancelled his illustration contracts from Hodder & Stoughton, leaving Dulac without work. Regarding these cancelled publications: “Les commandes prévues pour les années 1915, 1916 et 1917, ne pouvant être exécutées en raison de la guerre, les difficultés, financières des Dulac deviennent inévitables, même si l’aisance antérieure ne les rends pas encore dramatiques.” Pierre Nouilhan, Edmund Dulac 1882-1953: de Toulouse à Londres (Editions du Rouergue 2008), 58.

16 Letter written by Dulac to Martin Birnbaum, dated October 5, 1916. Dulac’s own emphasis and punctuation. Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Martin Birnbaum Papers, Microfilm 1023.

17 Phrasing of Dulac’s practice at this time derived from Colin White, letter to author, 14 February 2012. Dulac worked on his Three Wise Men contemporaneously with his illustrations for the book Tanglewood Tales which were carried out between 1916-1918.

18 According to Colin White, “Persian and Indian art meet” in Dulac’s Kingdom of the Pearl.” Dulac, 108. For more on the analogy between Dulac’s method and Persian miniature painting, see Rebecca Bruns, “Arabian Nights-and Art Nouveau,” Saudi Aramco World 30, no. 4 (July/August 1979).

International Congress on Persian Art in 1931 alongside Arthur Upham Pope.19 Ross was

purportedly taken aback at Dulac’s familiarity with Persian miniatures when they first met as the

topic was not well known outside of the scholarly community.20 In his autobiography, Ross wrote

about the “wonderful picture [by Dulac:] ...so accurate is the way in which Dulac has caught the

miniature style in subject and in colouring that all who see it take the caricature at first sight for a

Persian miniature of the sixteenth century.”21 Upon presenting the artwork to Ross three days

after their first meeting, Dulac credited a late-Timurid/early-Safavid source for his inspiration:

“Dear Prof. Ross,” he penned in an inscription, “please accept this fanciful caricature - inspired

by Behzad, no doubt.”22

Besides conversing with Ross, Dulac kindled friendships with the keeper of Oriental

Prints and Drawings in the British Museum Laurence Binyon,23 William Butler Yeats, and known

collectors of Indic and Islamic art such as Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. In addition,

Dulac surely viewed manuscripts and objects in London and Paris museums,24 galleries, private

collections, and as reproductions in survey books on Indian and Islamic art published between

1903 and 1917.25 The one reference I have ever found to Dulac’s 1917 painting is in a letter

addressed to him by Yeats from December 14th of that year that suggests Dulac’s total absorption

with Persian painting was enriched through conversations and collections. Yeats’s letter reads:

My dear Dulac, ...Madame Gonne...is longing to have a talk with you over the Persian miniatures ...I wish we could go & see your Magi but I am afraid it is impossible. [...]We met Dr. Bosschere last night and he

6

19 Rizvi, “Arthur Upham Pope”, 53. A venue to explore would be to determine if Dulac attended, or whether he had any correspondence with Pope during their lifetimes.

20 Colin White, Edmund Dulac, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 86.

21 E. Denison Ross, Both Ends Of The Candle, (London: Faber, 1943), 254.

22 Letter from Dulac to Ross, dated June 11th 1916, reproduced in Both Ends of the Candle, 255.

23 A caricature of Binyon by Dulac in a Japanese woodcut style is housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Laurence Binyon as Sharaku might have seen him, 1913.

24 In 1903, Dulac would have been in Paris at the time of the Exhibition of Muslim Art at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Pavillon de Marsan. Included in the exhibition were many manuscripts, examined by E. Blochet, “Mussulman Manuscripts and Miniatures as Illustrated in the Recent Exhibition at Paris,” Burlington 3, no. 9 (December 1903): 276-85. David Roxburgh provides an excellent history of these early collections and displays of Islamic art. “Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Collecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca. 1880-1910,” Ars Orientalis 30, (2000), 9-38.

25 1903 is a suggested start-date due to the emergence of Burlington Magazine appearing during this year. The year also coincides with the Exposition des Arts Musulmans at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, marking a turning-point for connoisseurship of Islamic art.

was saying it was one of the best things you have ever done. I suppose it is for the princess, perhaps she will let you bring me to see it sometime.26

Most piquant is the reference to an unidentifiable princess, perhaps an inside joke referring to

Dulac’s wife. Madame Gonne is Yeats’s friend Maud Gonne whose daughter Iseult was the

student of Professor Ross at the time.27 The doctor is the Belgian Symbolist painter and accused

Satanist Jean de Bosschère whom Dulac and Yeats befriended years earlier. It is out of this rich

social and intellectual setting that Dulac embarked to examine and replicate the Persian arts.

Appropriating the Arts of the Book

If one looks through published materials within the newly established field of Islamic Art

that would have been available to him at the time, Dulac’s Magi appear to have been derived

from reproduced manuscript pages executed for Shah Tahmāsp in F.R. Martin’s The Miniature

Painting and Painters of Persia, India and Turkey published in 1912. Martin’s book plates

containing Mughal and Rajput haloes could have foddered Dulac’s own divine markers. Perhaps

the idea to use a golden ground on which his figures appear to float rather than stand came from

a folio of Nizami’s Laila and Majnun. In this work, a tent hangs over a mother and child seated

in an Iranian encampment that echoes the bulbous thatched architecture over Dulac’s Holy

Family (figure 10). Period articles from academic journals such as the Burlington Magazine for

Connoisseurs also covered: plates and prints of Timurid, Safavid, Mughal miniatures; exhibitions

of Islamic arts; European archaeological missions excavating Buddhist and Hindu art at the time.

The fiery rays of Dulac’s Christ child comprise a pointed nimbus that is not of European artistic

origin, and parallel those found both in Martin’s book and in Burlington articles.28 Reviews of

Dulac’s illustrated books are mentioned in 1913 and 1914 issues,29 and artistic egos being what

they are all but confirm that he would have been a Burlington reader.

7

26 Transcribed letter generously provided by Professor James Pethica of Williams College. Letter coded 3374, from the Yeats archives at the Harry Ransom Research Center.

27 Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound found in Iseult Gonne: A Girl that Knew all of Dante Once. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares, et al. (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Letter no. 23. Iseult was studying the Bengali and Sanskrit languages with Ross.

28 The Islamic tradition demarcates holy figures with flames. The usage of haloes in Mughal painting confers both royalty and divinity. Including illustrations of such flamed coronas, the British historian of Islamic art T.W. Arnold attributed saints’ flame haloes to Buddhist art in “Some Persian and Indian Miniatures,” Burlington 31, no. 172 (July 1917), 25-27.

29 Reviews of Dulac’s illustrated books appear in “Reviews: Ornamental Books,” Burlington 24, no. 129 (December 1913) and in Burlington 26, no. 141 (December 1914).

All these reproduced illustrations of paintings and sculptures could have been the sources

from which Dulac derived the individual details for his composition. His iconographical

mishmash is akin to the carving-up of paintings from Persian manuscripts by collectors suited to

European aesthetics. But Dulac also possessed an appreciation for Iranian aesthetics as well in

arts of the book like illumination, paper-cutting, -dyeing, -sprinkling, and marbling, evidenced by

the composition of his speckled gold border framing his Three Wise Men. As for the broader

spark of inspiration and source material that could have motivated Dulac to depict a Christian

subject in a Persian style, there exist Mughal adaptations of the Christian Adoration subject in the

early seventeenth century, attributed to the presence of Portuguese Jesuits in the Mughal

Emperor Akbar’s court (figure 11). One wonders if Ross acquainted Dulac with this type of

material in the collection of albums and folios at the London School of Oriental Studies.30

Diverging from the precedent of Renaissance realism, Dulac employed a painting style

reserved for manuscripts, and not those of the Christian Gothic tradition but of the Persianate.

His Three Wise Men artwork draws on a plurality of iconographies derived from Hinduism,

Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity so that it correlates, combines, and confuses the divisions of

Christian and non-Christian, Western and non-Western. Dulac’s painting asserts the artist’s wide-

ranging interests and explorations of world art, for within his Christian subject he includes

iconographies from other traditions. Indeed, scholars in the decades leading up to Dulac’s

adoption of Persianate art forms were differentiating the entangled strands of Persian art.31 The

depth of Dulac’s learning and insights into Persian painting should not be overemphasized. He

clearly lacked a specialist’s expertise, being more interested in fusing multiple traditions and

producing generalized statements about a vague “spirit of art” and a pursuit of “pure form.” But

he worked to erode artistic and cultural boundaries and biases, while at the same time scholars

were doing the reverse and were fixing the differentiations between what were held to be distinct

types of cultures and styles of arts.

8

30 The School of Oriental and African Studies, as it exists today, has extensive collections of Mughal miniatures. For more on these Mughal Magi, see J.M Rogers’s section on the Jesuit presence in Akbar’s court in Mughal Miniatures (London: British Museum Press, 1993) and also Friederike Weis’s study “Christian Iconography Disguised: Images of Childbirth and Motherhood in Mer‘at al-Qods and Akbarname Manuscripts, 1595-1605,” South Asian Studies 24 (2004), 109-18.

31 Writing in 1903, an article by E. Blochet begins: “The workmanship of the paintings of the Sefevaean school is very different from that of the Mongolian and Timurid miniatures...and the hieratic pictures of the Mongolian period...[and] the dynasty of the Kadjars.” “Mussulman Manuscripts and Miniatures”, Burlington 3, no. 9 (December 1903), 276. In 1914, Clive Bell declares: “Very slowly it is becoming possible to construct a history of Persian painting.” “Persian Miniatures”, Burlington 25, no. 134 (May 1914), 111.

Dulac as Art Historian

Struggling to understand Persian art in context and on its own terms, in Dulac’s day many

art historians instead compared dispersed folios to examples in European art rather than within

Iranian culture. In addition, some scholars were hostile to the flatness of miniatures, denigrating

it as a failure to accommodate the “advancements” and “progress” of western art developments.32

Scholars tended to emphasize a rift between East and West in their art historical analysis,

declaring: “Great a distance is fixed...which separates an Egyptian statue of the Old Empire from

the Moses of Michael Angelo,”33 or insisting that “the Eastern artist, who enhances line and flat

tone at the expense of realism, is in direct contrast to the typical European, who thinks of the

objects he wishes to represent as actually existing in light and space.”34 Dulac challenged

scholarship that praised Classical and Renaissance aesthetics over less volumetric styles. He

protested the glorification of Eurocentric ideals to instead stress context and individual standards

in discussions of cultural art forms. Writing in 1925, Dulac wrote:

In the last three centuries, our education, especially in intellectual matters, has been one-sided. We believe that art has developed from a childish and clumsy thing [.] ...People today...will persist in thinking that the Ancient Egyptian or Chinese painter would have painted like Michel Angelo or Raphael if only they had known how to do it. If this were true it would mean that there is only one state of human culture that it is desirable to attain, and that all the others are painfully groping after it. ...This is obviously absurd.35

Part of the broader historicist impulse that worked against the academic aesthetic of the late-

nineteenth century, Dulac was not the only artist to derive influence from Persian painting after

the revolution of modern art (Matisse and Picasso come readily to mind).36 But his

vociferousness against Eurocentrism in academia sets him apart.

9

32 Blochet uses the following adjectives to describe Persian painting: stiff, angular, awkward, primitive, worthless. Also worth mentioning is his deriding Persian and Indian art when it does incorporate and experiment with Renaissance ideas. He dismisses them as “clumsy imitations of European drawings.” Changes to these aesthetics would come about in 1931 with the London exhibition of Persian Art at the Royal Academy.

33 Blochet, “Mussulman Manuscripts,” 276.

34 Wilhelm R. Valentiner, “Persian Miniatures,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 7, no. 2 (February 1912), 35-39.

35 Dulac, “Methods of Expression in Art” in Edmund Dulac: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Rights to quote from manuscript granted. Hereafter abbreviated HRC.

36 Oleg Grabar, Mostly Miniatures: An Introduction to Persian Painting, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 9.

! Dulac’s work must be inserted into the genealogy of the Adoration of the Magi subject as

popularized by European artists in the Renaissance. A brief analysis of British and French Magi

renditions by Edward Burne-Jones and James Tissot helps situate Dulac, as a French-born

Englishman, in his regional and temporal context.

The nineteenth century marked the abundance of Orientalist genre scenes in Europe that

responded to the urge for the exotic in art that the Magi in prior centuries had satisfied.37 Biblical

exoticism in art continued but there emerged debates about the aestheticism or realism attributed

to the rendered scenes. The French painter James Tissot produced The Journey of the Magi in

1894 (figure 12), thanks in part to new archaeological discoveries that made it possible to

reconstruct Biblical times on canvas. Around the same time, the British Pre-Raphaelite artist

Edward Burne-Jones created his canvas The Star of Bethlehem in 1890 (figure 13). Known to

celebrate Medievalism, members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood defined their association as

a primitive and spiritual movement, and their canvases aimed for the visual language of

primordial emotion as opposed to academic conventions brought about in the Enlightenment. For

a Victorian public nostalgic for the piety of the pre-industrial age, the Bible could be treated

alternatively as legend or historical truth. Biblical art could take on Burne-Jones’s medievalism

and fantasy, or Tissot’s archaeological authenticity.38 The latter proved to be more popular to the

public as it combined religion and reason to reconcile faith with science.39

Tissot and Burne-Jones’s artistic examples demonstrate the various stylistic modes of

portrayal available to European artists at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

It is out of this rich social, intellectual, and artistic setting that Dulac embarked to examine and

replicate the Persian arts. Faced with Tissot’s and Burne-Jones’s two means of rendering Biblical

events, one grounded in realism and science, the other in emotion and mysticism, Dulac’s

selecting Persian pictorial representation tellingly renders the Bible as a blend of legend and

10

37 Dennis Geronimus, personal conversation, 5 December 2011.

38 Warner, The Victorians. Christopher Wood reports the popularity of spiritualism as well as the Catholic revival in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot: 1836-1902 (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1986), 144.

39 Christopher Wood reports this popularity of spiritualism and the Catholic revival in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot: 1836-1902 (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1986), 144.

truth. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s “mythic visual language,”40 as phrased by Tim

Barringer, applies to Dulac’s Persianate representation of a religious scene, eschewing both

organized religion and pictorial verisimilitude at the same time.41

Since Dulac was an artist as well as an amateur art historian, his adoption of Persian

painting techniques was a means to oppose the “Hellenist and Renaissance eras, when these

devices of convergent lines, receding planes, and chiaroscuro…were wrongly held to be the

standard by which artistic perfection should be judged.”42 He was attracted to the non-imitative

traditions of different cultures on the margins of the classic western canon of art. Thanks to

preserved papers and correspondences, it is possible to determine Dulac’s interpretation of

different artistic styles and his own art historical insights through notes and articles.

In his own rumination on the history of art, Dulac outlined two separate aims of

expression in art that he acknowledged were never pure and unadulterated, but rather had

coexisted and sometimes interpenetrated each other.43 In unpublished notes and in his published

article “Modes of Thought and Aesthetic Expression” from a March 1925 issue of the English

Discovery: a Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge, he puts forward these two systems, calling

his two strains Subjective Art and Objective Art.44 The artist repeatedly vocalized his preference

for the former: the flatter and more stylized Subjective branch. Most interestingly, his

interpretive schema avoided a categorical division between East and West and so was neither

regionally nor culturally grounded. As though prescient of the East/West binary’s limitations,

Dulac put in place a binary of his choice premised on perspective and not on the religious or

ethnic affiliation of the artist or artwork. Inso doing, he was able to justify the similarities he saw

11

40 Tim Barringer, et al, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, (London: Tate, 2012), 9.

41 Thanks goes to Karolyn Kinane for suggesting a blend of truth and legend.

42 White, Dulac, 72.

43 Dulac, “Modes of Thought and Aesthetic Expression,” Discovery: A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge 6 (March 1925), 88-92.

44 Dulac’s notes are found in “Methods of Expression in Art” in Edmund Dulac: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Rights to quote from manuscript granted. Hereafter abbreviated HRC. These notes, circa 1924, are a palimpsest of his thought process. In earlier drafts Dulac refers to Objective Art as humanistic art, later individualistic. Subjective Art was previously non-humanistic and non-individualistic. The term “humanist” perhaps proved to be too ambiguous, at once disdainful of the divine but also altruistically concerned with the welfare of others. No wonder Dulac scrawled it out.

between “the multiple viewpoint of oriental and medieval art.”45 Tellingly, Dulac was then able

to align oriental with occidental: (European) medieval.

Unapologetically, Dulac defined Objective art (“Hellenist and Renaissance”) as leading

“nowhere, being a series of uncorrelated experiments.”46 He dismissed artists working in realist

styles as “unimaginative,” chiding their “limited ways” of reproducing that which is in front of

the eye, and likening their creations to photography that leaves nothing to the imagination of the

onlooker.47 Dulac found the artistic traditions in the Subjective grouping to be liberating and

better suited to express universal and cosmic themes. In abandoning three-dimensionality and

one-point perspective, he insisted that Subjective artists did not ignore nature. Dulac promoted

the Subjective ability to render narratives in flat forms as opposed to making illustration appear

as a window in Objective art.48 Rather, Subjective artists demonstrated that reality was and is

more than that which can be observed from solely one point of view.

Dulac’s articulation of Subjective art, formed by his examinations of Persian miniature

painting, is surprisingly close to scholars of Persian art today. For Oleg Grabar, Persian

painting’s originality lies in its unreality.49 The parts of the body, for example the eyes and feet,

are rendered the same size, even if in three-quarter view. Given that our very eyes seldom see

and absorb a single angle, darting about to-and-fro, miniature painting seeks to capture visual

experience in a different way. Dulac would have agreed with Grabar that Renaissance

“photographic realism” then, is a type of distortion, rendering the dynamism of movement and

life to a single, static, and frozen portrayal. Dulac realized this, and found that Subjective art

captured visual experience in a different way. Architecture is opened up to reveal multiple angles

of perspective in one form. Dulac explicitly placed Persian book illustrations under the

Subjective heading, declaring: “the [Subjective] artist is primarily concerned with the essential

nature...as we may see it in...Persian miniatures.”50

12

45 Dulac, “Modes of Thought.”

46 Ibid.

47 Dulac, “Methods of Expression,” HRC.

48 Phrasing of Dulac’s practice at this time derived from Colin White, letter to author, 14 February 2012.

49 Grabar, Mostly Miniatures, 111.

50 Dulac, “Methods of Expression,” HRC, 4.

This “essential nature”, or mode of visuality and means of representation as conveyed by

Persian miniatures, has proven to be elusive. Dulac’s scholarly contemporaries struggled to make

sense of the flatness of miniatures. Alexandre Papadopoulo’s 1979 “principle of inverisimilitude”

of Islamic artists representing a different world not limited to the physical or visible perhaps due

to a religious outlook, comes close to Dulac’s own interpretation from decades earlier.51 With

great insightfulness Dulac himself acknowledged differences in worldview and visual (and

cosmological) perspectives when he wrote, “art is the most revealing manifestation of human

activities and that it is the one that will most easily give us a clue to the nature of man and to his

outlook upon the world.”52 Papadopoulos’s thesis has been further nuanced by the Persian arts

scholar Priscilla Soucek, who has explained the absence of naturalism in Persian art by looking

to writings by Nizami. Soucek suggests painting is an intellectual activity of the Persian artist

who created a “representational art that would allay the suspicions of the theologically minded...

[by] stress[ing] the mental aspects of art.”53 Persian painters were prized for their ability to draw

on material “from the external senses of sight, hearing, touch, and smell” and store it in their

“imagination (khiyāl).”54 Dulac similarly stressed the mental components of the Subjective artist

who “paints things not as they happen to appear but as he knows them to be. ...Its process is

rational and intrinsic.”55

Dulac’s aesthetic theories tracing artistic styles across time periods and regions are

grounded in formalism and universalism. As Kishwar Rizvi points out, “to many artists, critics,

and art historians of the early twentieth century, [formalist aesthetic theories promoting

universalism] ...provided access to appreciation --if not the understanding -- of other forms of

13

51 Soucek, Rizvi, and Gruber have questioned and extended Papadopoulo’s arguments in contemporary scholarship. See Priscilla Soucek, “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000); Kishwar Rizvi, “The Suggestive Portrait of Shah ‘Abbas: Prayer and Likeness in a Safavid Shahnama,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 2 (June 2012); Christiane Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nūr): Representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Painting,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World 26 (2009).

52 Dulac, “Methods of Expression in Art,” HRC, 1.

53 Priscilla P. Soucek, "Nizami on Painters and Paintings." In Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Richard Ettinghausen, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), 19.

54 Soucek, "Nizami on Painters and Paintings," 11. Soucek directs attention to the Persian word nishān, that can be defined as “image” but also the “impressed image” on the eye. Soucek’s analysis is tailored to Persian art. For more on the broader sensory dimension in Islamic art, see Doris Behrens-Abouseif’s chapter “The Status of the Arts,” Beauty in Arabic Culture (New Jersey: Markus Wiener, 1999).

55 Dulac, “Modes of Thought,” 89. Dulac’s own emphasis.

art.”56 Dulac was no exception to this leveling and generalizing, and his writings give no

indication that he bothered with contextualizing his art historical insights. His notes make no

mention of the historical, religious, or political movements going on during the time his beloved

Safavid artists were putting brushes to pages. But Dulac in his early entrance onto a rich vein of

study pursued the same queries as today’s scholarship. These studies continue to advance

theories to articulate why select “Islamic traditions...embrace either non-naturalistic or abstract

modes of representation...to go beyond the mimetic imitation of forms...[to] acknowledge the

possibilities of identifications existing above and beyond the restrictive limitations of physical

mimicry.”57 Had Dulac been around in this century and gained a familiarity with the knowledge

available now, one wonders what theories he would have advanced related to Persianate painting.

Dulac lauded the Subjective arts for most of his life, but it is worth remembering that he

himself began his career as an Objective artist. His style transitioned from painterly washes to

angularity and contour; the artist’s ‘epiphany’ then in choosing Subjective art over the Objectivist

comes out by comparing his 1912 Three Kings to his 1917 Three Wise Men. Taking on the

Persian style and working fully in its tradition to suit his own subjects, Dulac’s turn to the

miniature arts for book illustration caused his contemporaries and some scholars today to liken

him to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Safavid and Mughal masters and illustrators of

books themselves. By using paper and paint to depict figures and settings, both Edmund Dulac

and the Persian miniaturist are working in the book arts and dealing with representation and the

conversion of three-dimensional forms onto a two-dimensional surface. Dulac’s interviewer

Hugh Stokes in 1912 even suggested he was a reincarnation, producing pictures that recalled

“the rich illuminations of the earlier Persian craftsmen, but [with] a technical skill which Oriental

artists never reached.58 However laudatory, such a compliment calls to mind “the gung-ho

imperialism and the unquestioning belief in the superiority of Europe” facing Dulac as he entered

onto Persian painting scholarship that was “ill-equipped to deal with the manifestations of

ancient and subtle cultures about which [it] knew very little.”59 Dulac’s universalization and

14

56 Rizvi, “Arthur Upham Pope,” 55. Rizvi directs her attention to the scholars Roger Fry and Clive Bell, two art historians who contributed pieces on Persian art to Burlington Magazine and from whom Dulac likely received intellectual influence.

57 Christiane Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nūr): Representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Painting”, Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World 26 (2009), 231.

58 Stokes, “Edmund Dulac,” 229.

59 Hillenbrand, “Western scholarship on Persian Painting before 1914,” 224.

generalization in his amateur theories can be forgiven when compared to his tenured and

accredited contemporaries.

Dulac’s looking to other traditions to achieve a global, artistic synthesis repeats a claim of

Ananda Coomaraswamy’s. In a 1912 Burlington article on Rajput and Mughal miniatures,

Coomaraswamy proposed that miniatures are for “those who care for pure expression rather than

mere representation, or are in some other way prepared to understand and sympathise with

Indian thought [and other cultures. T]hese paintings are the key to the door of an enchanted land

which, once entered, can never be forgotten.”60 Dulac could not have agreed more. By using

paper and paint to depict figures and settings, Edmund Dulac took a seat in the workshops of old,

becoming a Persian painter himself. Additionally, through his sympathies to and studies of the

Persian book arts, Dulac is also akin to the Magi themselves, becoming the fourth wise man in

their procession.

15

60 Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Rajput Paintings,” Burlington 20, no. 108 (March 1912), 324.

List of Figures

1.) Edmund Dulac. The Three Wise Men. 1917. Image from the Williams College Museum of Art. Accession number: 82.22.39.

2.) Detail of Persian miniature from the Safavid period, attributed to Aqa Mirak. Circa 1530. Reproduced in Claude Anet, “Exhibition of Persian Miniatures at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris-II,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 22, no. 116 (November 1912). Here, it is captioned: “Lovers-by ‘Abd Allāh. Mid XVI century. Bukhara.”

3.) Portrait of the Emperor Shah Jahan in Old Age. Mughal, late seventeenth century. Image from the Williams College Museum of Art. Accession number: 83.26.5

4.) Sculpture of Nataraja: Dancing Shiva. Same statue featured in Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Indian Bronzes,” Burlington 17, no. 86 (May 1910): 86-94.

5.) Edmund Dulac. “The Princess of Deryabar.” Stories from the Arabian Nights, 1907.

6.) Arthur Rackham. “Looking Very Undancey Indeed.” Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906.

7.) Edmund Dulac. Three Kings of Orient. 1912. Image reproduced in Edmund Dulac's Picture-Book for the French Red Cross (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916).

8.) Edmund Dulac. “The Talisman Pearl.” Illustration from Léonard Rosenthal, The Kingdom of the Pearl (London: Nisbet & Co., 1920). The same white, thatched architecture here and in the 1917 Three Wise Men echoes the bulbous tents of a Persian miniature showing an Iranian encampment from 1520 which similarly hangs over a mother and child (figure 10).

9.) Edmund Dulac. Caricature portrait of Sir Edward Denison Ross. 1916. Image from a Christie’s auction sale, 18 July 1975, also reproduced as a frontispiece in Ross’s autobiography, Both Ends of the Candle. The artist has crafted his name and his friend’s using Arabic characters although it is readable in English.

10.) Detail from “The Old Woman Bringing Majnūn to the Camp of Lailā from a manuscript of Nizāmī executed for Shāh Tahmāsp, A.D. 1539-1543 Signed Mīr Sayyid ‘Alī.” Image from F.R. Martin, The Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India and Turkey, from the 8th to the 18th Century (London: Holland Press, 1912).

11.) The Adoration of the Magi in a Mughal miniature, circa 1602. Image from Friederike Weis, “Christian Iconography Disguised: Images of Childbirth and Motherhood in Mer‘at al-Qods and Akbarname Manuscripts, 1595-1605,” South Asian Studies 24 (2004), 109-18.

12.) James Tissot. The Journey of the Magi. 1894. From his series The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ which includes two other Magi scenes: The Adoration of the Magi and The Magi in the House of Herod. Image from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Collection.

13.) Edward Burne-Jones. The Star of Bethlehem. 1890. Image from Artstor.

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17

Fig. 2 Fig. 3Fig. 4

Fig. 1

18

Fig. 7

Fig. 6Fig. 5

19

Fig. 9

Fig. 8

20

Fig. 10Fig. 11

Fig. 12 Fig. 13