"Revealing Such Treasure as Surely Mortal Eyes Had Never Before Gazed Upon," frontispiece from "The Story of Baba Abdalla," in "The Arabian Nights"
Edward Julius Detmold British
Not on view
This striking watercolor shows the Oriental merchant Baba Abdalla standing beside a cloaked dervish lighting a magic fire. Rising smoke causes a mountainside to open and reveal a palatial interior filled with treasures. At left, Abdalla’s camels approach through a narrow rocky pass to carry away the treasures. The story goes on to relate how the greedy merchant could not bear to share
the riches with the dervish and ultimately lost everything. A high point in Detmold’s achievement as an illustrator, the drawing was reproduced in a 1924 luxury edition of "The Arabian Nights" and demonstrates his admiration for the fantastic images found in recent designs by Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley.
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