DULAC, Edmund.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Original artwork for American Weekly: "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." An unused illustration intended for the Sunday newspaper supplement, American Weekly. The drawing was published on page 89 of Colin White's study of Dulac, together with the statement that it is one of the "few instances throughout his career when [Dulac] deliberately portrayed the horrific" (p. 88).As the vogue for the great books of the Golden Age of Illustration ended, Dulac began to find his income precarious, and he found much-needed work from the American Weekly. Dulac contributed covers for the periodical in 1924, 1925, 1929, 1931-34, 1936-38, 1940, 1942, and 1950-51.For several years Dulac had been eager to illustrate The Book of Revelation. In October 1928 Dulac wrote excitedly to W. B. Yeats that he was about to start work in the hope that American Weekly would accept them for publication. Unfortunately, the magazine did not wish to depart from use of full colour covers, and Dulac was forced to abandon the project. A couple of years later he painted two illustrations, the present piece and "The Scarlet Woman of Babylon", "in the vain hope that if finished they might one day prove acceptable to American Weekly" (White, p. 142)."[Dulac] used a carefully graded verdigris... He had assimilated some of the formulae; the lightly-shaded edges he used everywhere; the streamlining... and the wavy parallel bands with which he symbolized clouds or the sea. He worked with a much finer and dryer brush,

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