HANDSOMELY BOUND TREASURE ISLAND WITH 12 COLOR PLATES BY DULAC

STEVENSON, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. With Illustrations by Edmund Dulac. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927. Quarto, modern full blue morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. $3500.

First edition of Stevenson’s beloved adventure to be illustrated by Edmund Dulac, with 12 color plates (including frontispiece) and 21 black and white sketches by him, handsomely bound by Bayntun-Riviere.

In conceiving his illustrations for this work, "Dulac experimented with a new style. He… painted the illustrations in closely related tones to give a pastel-like, dreamy softness. He conceived each of the drawings as a distance shot from above, making the characters look tiny against the vastness of the surrounding scene. The effect was strange, like an optical illusion, and very successful. Many years later Dulac admitted that the illustrations which most pleased him were those for Treasure Island… He remarked that of all the work he had ever done, the pictures for Treasure Island were the only ones he would not have altered in any way" (White, Edmund Dulac, 135). Dulac's beautifully realized illustrations for this rare volume were further inspired by the Middle East, and "his watercolours of legendary subjects have a gemlike brilliance found only in Mogul miniatures, their flat, stylised and sleepy beauty sometimes comes from the Japanese print, sometimes from the Pre-Raphaelites and even occasionally from the Renaissance" (Houfe, 124). Beinecke 273. Hughey 72. Bookplate.