Edward FitzGerald / Edmond Dulac - Rubáiyát de Omar Kháyyám - 1910

First French edition, deluxe issue. No. 224 of 300 copies on Japon, signed by Edmund Dulac to limitation page. With 67 leaves and 20 colour tipped-in plates each with its original captioned tissue guard. The text translated into French from Fitzgerald’s second version (110 quatrains). Book is in a very good condition. In protective glassine covering, and within original decorative card slipcase. Spine has a small tear. This appears to be from being put into its accompanying slipcase. Slipcase has been bumped on the corners. Book is weak at front hinge. Unpaginated; approximately 67 leaves, printed on one side only. 30 x 24 cm. This French text is not a direct translation from the Persian. Charles Grolleau translated Fitzgerald’s English version into French. He based his rendering principally on Fitzgerald’s second version of 110 quatrains, rather than the first 1859 text. Dulac's fabulous illustrations have Persian, Art Nouveau and Symbolist influences. In 1859 Edward FitzGerald published, anonymously, a free English version of quatrains attributed to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. It sold almost nothing. Copies were remaindered for a penny in a London bookseller’s bargain box, where Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne found it, loved it and passed it round. Within a few decades it had become one of the most popular poems in the English language Khayyam (1048–1131) was best known in his own time as a mathematician and astronomer: Dulac was born in Toulouse and moved to London, becoming one of the great illustrators of the “golden age” of gift books alongside Arthur Rackham. He became a British citizen in 1912. 20 colour plates draw on Persian miniature painting, The signed French deluxe edition on Japan is scarcer than the English edition.

Estimation:€220

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