The Little Mermaid by Edmund Dulac (1911): The Illustration That Changed How We See Andersen's Story
In 1836, Hans Christian Andersen published a fairy tale about a mermaid who gives up her voice to become human for the love of a prince she cannot have, and dissolves into seafoam when she fails. It is one of the strangest and most uncompromising stories in the Western canon — a fable about longing, sacrifice, and transformation that refuses the comfort of a happy ending. For most of its history, readers encountered it without pictures. Then, in 1911, Edmund Dulac illustrated it, and the story acquired a visual identity it has never entirely shaken.
Who Was Edmund Dulac?
Edmund Dulac established his reputation as a book illustrator with Stories from the Arabian Nights, retold by Laurence Housman and published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1907, featuring fifty tipped-in colour plates that captured the opulent and fantastical elements of the tales through intricate watercolour compositions. Born in Toulouse in 1882, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, he moved to London in 1905 and never looked back. By 1911, he was the most coveted illustrator in Britain.
Known for his sophisticated use of colour and composition, Dulac's work drew inspiration from Persian miniatures, Japanese prints, and European Symbolism. This synthesis — Eastern decorative richness, Japanese compositional flatness, Western narrative clarity — is what made his work unlike anything his contemporaries were producing. Arthur Rackham was scratchy, gothic, rooted in the English countryside. Kay Nielsen was Nordic and spectral. Dulac was luminous, jewelled, and oceanic. He was the obvious choice for Andersen.
The 1911 Edition: Stories from Hans Andersen
Published by Hodder & Stoughton in London as part of their lavish gift book series, the volume features 28 full-colour plates and numerous intricate decorations, each rendered in Dulac's signature style — jewel-toned hues, delicate brushwork, and a dreamlike fusion of Eastern and Western motifs.
The collection comprises six stories: The Snow Queen, The Swineherd, The Nightingale, The Real Princess, The Emperor's New Clothes, and The Mermaid. The book was published in two forms: a trade edition in green cloth, and a deluxe edition limited to 750 copies signed by Dulac, printed on Japanese vellum, bound in full vellum ornately gilt-stamped, with yellow silk ties and decorative endpapers. Both sold out. The original watercolours were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in London — a tradition Dulac and Hodder & Stoughton had established with their earlier collaboration on The Arabian Nights — and sold alongside the book.
Contemporary critics were unequivocal. A reviewer in Art and Literature (December 1911) wrote: "In certain qualities of fantasy and delicate strength, and lurid, imaginative daring, Mr Rackham and Mr Pogany are inimitable, but for sheer grace and poetry of feeling I am inclined to give the palm to Mr Edmund Dulac. I doubt if Mr Dulac has ever done better work as a book-illustrator than he has put into the series of colour-plates with which he has illustrated Hans Andersen."
The Story Dulac Was Illustrating
Before the plates, the story itself — because Dulac's illustrations only make full sense in relation to Andersen's text, which is considerably darker and stranger than most people realise.
Far out at sea the water is as blue as the bluest cornflower, and as clear as the clearest crystal. The palace of the Merman King lies in the very deepest part; its walls are of coral and the long pointed windows of the clearest amber, but the roof is made of mussel shells which open and shut with the lapping of the water. The youngest of the Sea King's six daughters is the most beautiful and the most restless. She has heard about the world of humans. She waits.
When she finally rises to the surface, she witnesses a storm, rescues a prince from drowning, falls in love, and returns to the depths knowing she cannot stay. She goes to the sea witch — who lives in a forest of half-animal, half-vegetable creatures, beyond a boiling whirlpool — and makes a bargain: her voice in exchange for legs. The legs will feel like knives at every step. If the prince marries another, she will dissolve into seafoam at dawn.
He marries another. The sea witch gave her a knife. It is a very special knife. If the mermaid kills the prince with it, she will live like a mermaid again. But she doesn't want to do that. She loves the prince more than her life. She watches the sunrise and dissolves — not into nothing, but into the daughters of air, soulless creatures who earn souls through three hundred years of good deeds. It is, as Andersen intended, a story about the cost of desire, the impossibility of belonging to two worlds, and the particular cruelty of being transformed into something that still cannot reach what it wants.
Disney changed the ending. Dulac did not.
How Dulac Illustrated It
For these illustrations, Dulac used watercolour, gouache, pen, and ink on paper. The technique matters because it determined what was possible. Watercolour allowed him the translucency he needed for underwater light — the way colour thins and diffuses as it moves toward the surface. Gouache gave him the opacity for his deep teals and midnight blues, the specific darkness of the sea at depth. Pen and ink gave him the precision of detail in the costumes, the coral, the decorative borders.
His underwater scenes — and it is the underwater scenes that define this edition — work through a particular colour logic. The deeper the water, the deeper and cooler the tones: indigo, viridian, slate. As figures move toward the surface, the palette warms and lightens. The jewel-toned hues and delicate brushwork create a dreamlike fusion of Eastern and Western motifs that gives the underwater palace an architectural richness drawn more from Persian miniature tradition than from any naturalistic conception of the ocean floor. The coral columns have the ornamental weight of Islamic tilework. The framing devices — the border elements that surround each plate — echo Japanese woodblock print design.
This is not inconsistency. It is a deliberate synthesis, and it is precisely what makes the images feel both otherworldly and visually coherent. Dulac understood that Andersen's sea kingdom is not a place that should look like anything in the real world. It should look like the inside of a dream about beauty.
The plates that survive most powerfully in visual memory are the ones that hold the mermaid still — watching, suspended, in that moment just before transformation or loss. She is almost never shown in motion. She is shown waiting. The images have the quality of held breath.
Why These Images Still Matter
From the sorrowful elegance of The Little Mermaid to the whimsical grandeur of The Emperor's New Clothes, Dulac's illustrations breathe life into Andersen's stories with unparalleled richness and emotional depth. But the specific achievement of the Little Mermaid plates is more precise than that. Dulac found a visual language for longing — for the particular grief of someone who has given up everything and stands on the threshold of a world that doesn't quite receive her.
His illustrations for Stories from Hans Andersen represent the peak of his early career, displaying his ability to balance ethereal beauty with narrative power. They are not decorations. They are interpretations. They make an argument about what the story means — that it is fundamentally about the incompatibility between the worlds the mermaid inhabits, and the beauty and horror of the space between them.
For over a century, this is the version of the story that readers have seen first, before the Disney version, before the countless retellings. Dulac's ability to render luxurious detail and subtle emotions is otherworldly. These plates are why.
The Plates as Prints
This edition was one of the most sumptuously illustrated editions of Hans Andersen ever produced, and the individual plates — designed to be tipped in to the book by hand, each facing its relevant passage of text — were conceived as complete images, self-sufficient as works of art. They hold as well on a wall as they did on a page. The colour balance, the compositional stillness, the decorative border work: all of it was built to survive separation from the text.
A Dulac Little Mermaid print on a wall is not a piece of nostalgia. It is a piece of argument — about what the story is, what Andersen intended, and what it means to long for something you can never fully reach.
→ Explore our Edmund Dulac collection at Wallango — museum-quality reproductions on archival paper, ready to frame.