“To be an Infidel or an Unbeliever...” Five Wise Men: Edmund Dulac, W. B. Yeats, and The Magi

Authors

  • Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp Williams College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11157/rsrr3-2-582

Keywords:

Orientalism, Occultism, Persian Art

Abstract

This paper examines the treatment of the Adoration of the Magi in a 1917 painting by Edmund Dulac (1882–1953). By rendering its subject in a Persian painting style and combining Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian elements, Dulac correlates East and West, secular and sacred, Christian and non-Christian. Coming in the midst of the First World War, the painting shows a suffering public in England turning to exoticism as a means of escaping a dismal reality. However calm and serene the figures appear, they mask the tension and angst of the outside world. The artwork illuminates the artist’s time period as well as his own intriguing beliefs, influenced by Theosophy, spiritism, esotericism, mysticism, and occultism. 

Author Biography

Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp, Williams College

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp received her MA degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 2012. She obtained a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, with a major in Near Eastern Studies specializing in Islamic Civilizations. Her interests include Islamic art and architecture, Orientalism, visual culture, and the Arabic, Persian, and Tajiki languages. She has researched World’s Fairs, ladies’ fashion turbans in interwar America, Qur’anic and Persian manuscripts, and the influence of Persian painting on European artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Her research relates cultural theory to visual culture so as to trace the diffusion of Orientalist tropes across time and place. Preferring to study visual material that exists outside the classification of the fine arts, her work asserts that cultural expression is not limited to solely the classical.

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Published

2013-12-18

How to Cite

Comstock-Skipp, J. K. (2013). “To be an Infidel or an Unbeliever.” Five Wise Men: Edmund Dulac, W. B. Yeats, and The Magi. Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 3(2), 307–28. https://doi.org/10.11157/rsrr3-2-582

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2013): Special Issue: New Age and Neopagan Medievalisms

Section

Articles

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