The Queen of Sheba
Edmund Dulac (British, 1882–1953)
1911
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, watercolor, and gouache, with graphite and color wax crayon, on artist’s drawing board
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 31.6 x 25.4 cm (12 7/16 x 10 in.)
- Culture
- England, 20th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Bequest of James Parmelee
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
A celebrated artist of the golden age of British book illustration, the French-born Edmund Dulac was inspired by Persian miniatures and manuscript illustration. This watercolor was one of a series of four scenes painted to accompany a poem by André Dumas, Figures of the Orient. Dulac depicted legendary enchantresses of the East: Circe, Salome, Scheherazade, and here, the Queen of Sheba. Aloft a camel, the dark-haired beauty languorously surveys the arid landscape as she and her entourage approach the Holy Land. Vibrant silks spill out of the queen’s gold and lapis howdah, a veritable mosaic of texture and pattern.
