7 Tales from King Arthur’s Court
About
7 Tales from King Arthur’s Court
In 1923, “Edmund Dulac, the Distinguished English Artist”, as he was billed on the front covers, was contracted by the Hearst organization to paint watercolors for The American Weekly magazine. The Sunday supplement for the Hearst newspaper chain published from roughly 1895 through 1961 featured many popular artists and illustrators. Dulac painted 106 watercolors from 1924-1951 for thirteen different series for The American Weekly. This is Dulac’s largest body of work, and has never before been assembled nor published.
In the years preceding WWII, Hearst commissioned Dulac to illustrate two particularly English themes, King Arthur and Canterbury Tales. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dulac had never tried his hand at Arthurian or Middle English folklore. He was primarily known as an ‘Orientalist’ and his renderings of The Arabian Nights Tales, the Rubaiyat and Persian miniatures brought him fame, if not fortune.
Both these series, planned for 1940 and 1942, were accompanied by text written by John Erskine, scholar, professor and noted author of the best seller The Private Life of Helen of Troy, made into a movie in 1927. Erskine was by now retired and contributed many texts for other American Weekly illustrators, like Willy Pogany and Henry Clive. Although not remembered well today, Erskine’s descendants have been prominent in arts and entertainments for the last century. His daughter Anna married Russell Crouse, who with his partner Howard Lindsay co-wrote Broadway musicals. Their daughter is Lindsay Crouse, an actor of movies and TV (Places in the Heart and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). She married David Mamet, a writer and director, who won the Pulitzer for Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984. Their daughters are Willa and Zosia Mamet. Zosia also stars in movies and TV shows, (Tales of the City and The Decameron) and does voice-overs for the series The Simpsons.
These are the Seven Tales-
First Tale -The Tale of Arthur’s Sword “Excalibur”
Second Tale -The Tale of Sir Tristram and the Love Potent
Third Tale -The Tale of the Enchantress and the Magic Scabbard
Fourth Tale -The Tale of Sir Galahad and his Quest for the Sangreal
Fifth Tale -The Tale of Launcelot and the Four Queens
Sixth Tale -The Tale of Merlin and One of the Ladies of the Lake
Seventh Tale -The Tale of How Sir Launcelot Slew Sir Agravaine
A Whose Who? follows each Tale explaining the characters in more detail.
For the introduction, an essay Erskine wrote on Malory’s Morte D’Arthur in his 1928 best-seller The Delight of Great Books is included, with illustrations highlighting the sources mentioned.
A Further Reading section concludes this edition with a century of other illustrated versions of King Arthur published from 1862 through 1962, with the book covers and illustrations. Some of the artists featured are- Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Gustave Doré, Walter Crane, Russell Flint, Alberto Sangorski, Aubrey Beardsley, Thomas Mackenzie, Gustaf Tenggren, Louis Rhead and others.
The complete collections of the Edmund Dulac American Weekly illustrations are available as both eBooks and print editions published by Dulacebooks on Amazon.
Praise for this book
With endless books being added daily to bookstore shelves (physical and virtual), it’s easy to go ‘deer in the headlights’ while trying to select your next read. You hope it will provide entertainment and serve as transportation to another place, perhaps another time, if just for a little while.
Finding that little needle in a constantly growing haystack can be a challenge. When I discovered Seven Tales from King Arthur’s Court, I soon realized that I’d discovered a needle — a handcrafted, labor of love, one of a kind needle, one that has taken a full century to create.
Editor Albert Seligman has been working on this project for over thirty years. He took on the challenge of locating all 106 of Edmund Dulac’s illustrations published in the American Weekly magazine between 1924 and 1951.
In a recent email conversation, Albert Seligman told me that, “I found them in Bill Blackbeard’s Academy of Comic Art in San Francisco. Bill allowed us to remove and photograph the covers.” Imaging what an honor (and thrill!) it must have been to take temporary possession of so much rare artwork.
One outcome of that project is this book. It contains seven stories by John Erskine, originally published in the American Weekly magazine. Each story is accompanied by an Edmund Dulac illustration. You’ll also enjoy the art of other “Golden Age” illustrators throughout the book.
In the introduction, Seligman provides a wealth of information about John Erskine and Edmund Dulac for those who may not be familiar with their work. A lengthy, fascinating essay titled “The Delight of Great Books” by John Erskine serves as a prelude to the seven Arthurian stories.
If you love Arthurian legends, or are a fan of the Golden Age of Illustration (1880–1930), this book should find a special place in your personal library. It will entertain you, delight your eyes, and remind you that classic artwork and storytelling is well worth the effort of preserving.