Really Old Old-School Artist: René Bull

It's been quite a while since I've done one of these posts. But it's also been quite a while since I stumbled across a new artist that I felt like I wanted to cover. I'm not sure what had me looking through copies of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (well, actually I do, but I'd rather not say... yet), but I found an edition with which I was unfamiliar. This one features the art of British illustrator and photographer René Bull. I'll let you go to the Wikipedia link (just there) if you want the skinny on this Dublin-born son of a French mother and British father.

Bull's color work reminds of Edmund Dulac and Howard Pyle, in terms of tone and painting style. On the other hand, Bull's B&W work is, in a lot of ways, the overall "look" I had in my mind for the higher level mystics when I wrote the Basic Psionics Handbook. Particularly the image below that looks like the guy is floating on pillows.

Without further ado, here you go...

Really Old Old-School Artist Week Day 4:Edmund Dulac

And so continues my week of "Really Old Old-School Artists." Today's artist is Edmund Dulac. Though Dulac is best known for his color work, I'm showcasing some of his rarer B&W work. The first seven images are from an edition of Poe's poetical works, and you can see the painter in Dulac coming through in his line work. The final two are bookplate images—the first from a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the second from a 1907 edition of Stories from The Arabian Nights . I'm particularly fond of the final image and wish I could find more of his work like it, but that kind of work was such a rarity for him, I doubt I will.