Dulac's Arabian Nights or Disney's Agrabah?

Immediately above (and below) are two of Edmund Dulac's illustrations for Stories from the Arabian Nights by Laurence Housman in 1907. Up top is Disney's Agrabah in Aladdin - clearly an homage. Dulac was a French book illustrator whose heyday was in England in the years before World War I and he produced his whimsical flights of fancy for many books, including Edgar Allan Poe's poems and fairytales such as Beauty & the Beast.

Such images are Orientalist but interesting. Below is a Dulac revision from 1911 for Housman's The Story of the Magic Horse (also known as The Enchanted Horse). It is the story of a Persian prince and his magical ebony horse which allows him to fly to distant lands and rescue a princess rather like Aladdin.

Housman was a prolific writer and an interesting figure in his own right. He was gay, strongly supported women's suffrage, and he may well have been the "the most censored playwright in England."