Night time sea, Edmond Dulac

A night sea, a storm, and two faces in the waves. In this illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Edmund Dulac fills almost the whole sheet with the sea: churning swells in deep blue and silvery white, foam breaking over the top of the picture. Only low down, almost lost in the water, do we see the little mermaid, flowers in her long dark hair, holding the prince’s head above the waves.

This is the turning point of the tale. On the night of her fifteenth birthday, the youngest daughter of the Sea King rises to the surface for the first time and sees a ship lit with lanterns. A storm breaks, the ship goes down, and she dives among the wreckage to save the young prince, carrying him through the night to the shore. He will never know who saved him. Dulac leaves out the ship and the lightning and paints only the sea, which makes the two small figures all the more moving.

Edmund Dulac, master of the golden age of illustration

Edmund Dulac (1882-1953) was born in Toulouse and settled in London in the early 1900s, where he became, with Arthur Rackham, the great name of the illustrated gift books of the Edwardian era: The Arabian Nights, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the Rubáiyát. His watercolours, reproduced in colour plates, are known for their deep blues, their soft light and their Japanese and Persian influences. His Stories from Hans Andersen, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1911, include The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen and The Nightingale.

• Artist: Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)
• Date: 1911
• Technique: watercolour, reproduced as a colour plate
• Source: Stories from Hans Andersen, Hodder & Stoughton, London
• Format: vertical
• Theme: The Little Mermaid, Andersen, sea, waves, fairy tale

Its blues and greys bring calm to a bathroom, a bedroom or a child’s room. Pair it with its companion piece, The Little Mermaid Swimming, or with John William Waterhouse’s The Mermaid, and find all of Dulac’s plates in our Edmund Dulac collection and more tales in our fairy tale posters. Printed on thick matte archival paper, in 13 sizes from A4 to A0. Free shipping, no minimum order. Shipped rolled in a sturdy tube.