Kingdom of the Pearl

New York: Brentano. 1st ed. Dulac, Edmund. #128 of 675 copies allocated for sale in America.10 tipped-in color plates with captioned tissue guards by Edmund Dulac. 4to half white cloth and grey paper-covered boards, decorated with a Dulac underwater design of stylized waves and sea shells, silver on a black background. Gilt spine titles and vignette, small onlaid title plate on the cover. Includes just the rear half of the dust wrapper, lavender on cream paper, edgeworn. The bottom tips have about 1/2" worn through to boards, small scuff on the upper left cover, 4 tape residue marks on the free endpapers.Light to moderate foxing inside. Bright covers and spine, near fine.

Although the theme of this is pearls, their history, commerce and origin, Dulac has incorporated his love of Asian and Persian mythology in each plate, sporting naked ladies and characters in ornate costumes and settings. This was first published in 1920, when he was migrating from his traditional style to a more stylized Art Deco, so it incorporates both of his strengths.

In a review in The Studio in 1926, they say Dulac "adapts his talents to conventional Persian style without perspective, rich in decorative forms and jewel-like colours, to bring out the beauty in minute things by use of colour and graceful line."

"The 'Pearl' illustrations indeed display a ripening of a Dulac style first seen in Sindbad the Sailor, employed in some of his Fair Book pictures and developed fully in The Tanglewood Tales. It is a Persian miniature style, but made quite his own. The Tanglewood plate 'They made haste to wallow down on all fours' could exist side-by-side with Pearl pictures as illustrations for the same story without a single jarring note...His plates, truly genius, do much to bring a fanciful touch to an otherwise stark exposition of a treatise on pearls." - Hughey 54

The endpapers feature a geometric design of seaweed in grey-green ink, repeated on the jacket. This American edition came out five years after the limited English edition.