Gustave Doré

Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was a French printmaker, illustrator, painter, comics artist, caricaturist, and sculptor. He is best known for his prolific output of wood-engravings illustrating classic literature, especially those for the Vulgate Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy. These achieved great international success, and he became renowned for printmaking, although his role was normally as the designer only; at the height of his career some 40 block-cutters were employed to cut his drawings onto the wooden printing blocks, usually also signing the image.
He created over 10,000illustrations, the most important of which were copied using an electrotype process using cylinder presses, allowing very large print runs to be published simultaneously in many countries.
Although Doré's work was popular with the general public during his life, it was met with mixed reviews from contemporary art critics. His work has been more widely celebrated in the centuries following his death. Among his admirers were writers H. P. Lovecraft and Théophile Gautier.

Biography

Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6January 1832. At the age of15, he began his career working as a caricaturist for the French paper Le journal pour rire. The illustrations of J. J. Grandville have been noted as an influence on his work. Wood-engraving was his primary method at this time. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he made several text comics, like Les Travaux d'Hercule, Trois artistes incompris et mécontents, Les Dés-agréments d'un voyage d'agrément and L'Histoire de la Sainte Russie. Doré subsequently went on to win commissions to depict scenes from books by Cervantes, Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante.
In 1853 Doré was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for British publishers, including a new illustrated Bible. In 1854 he illustrated Gargantua et Pantagruel. In 1856 he produced 12folio-size illustrations of The Legend of The Wandering Jew, which propagated longstanding antisemitic views of the time, for a short poem which Pierre-Jean de Béranger had derived from a novel of Eugène Sue of 1845.
In the 1860s he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes's Don Quixote, and his depictions of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza, became so famous that they influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors' ideas of the physical "look" of the two characters. Doré also illustrated an oversized edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", an endeavor that earned him 30,000francs from publisher Harper & Brothers in 1883.
The government of France made him a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1861.
Doré's illustrations for the Bible were a great success, and in 1867 he had a major exhibition of his work in London. This exhibition led to the foundation of the Doré Gallery in Bond Street, London. In 1869, Blanchard Jerrold, the son of Douglas William Jerrold, suggested that they work together to produce a comprehensive portrait of London. Jerrold had obtained the idea from The Microcosm of London produced by Rudolph Ackermann, William Pyne, and Thomas Rowlandson. Doré signed a five-year contract with the publishers Grant & Co that involved his staying in London for three months a year, and he received the vast sum of £10,000 a year for the project. Doré was celebrated for his paintings in his day, but his wood-engravings, like those he did for Jerrold, are where he excelled as an artist with an individual vision.
The completed book London: A Pilgrimage, with 180wood engravings, was published in 1872. It enjoyed commercial and popular success, but the work was disliked by some contemporary British critics, as it appeared to focus on the poverty that existed in parts of London. Doré was accused by The Art Journal of "inventing rather than copying." The Westminster Review claimed that "Doré gives us sketches in which the commonest, the vulgarest external features are set down." But they impressed Vincent van Gogh, who painted a version of the Prisoners' Round in 1890, the year of his death. The book was a financial success, however, and Doré received commissions from other British publishers.
Doré's later work included illustrations for new editions of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Milton's Paradise Lost, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, The Works of Thomas Hood, and The Divine Comedy. Doré's work also appeared in the weekly newspaper The Illustrated London News.
The medical doctor Jean-Baptiste Fuzier, who was a specialist in yellow fever and other tropical diseases, bequeathed watercolor paintings by Doré to the museum of Grenoble in 1880. According to the Musée de Grenoble, Doré developed his expertise as a watercolorist during a trip to Scotland in 1873.

Death

Doré never married and, following the death of his father in 1849, he continued to live with his mother, illustrating books until his death of a heart attack in Paris on January23, 1883, following a short illness. At the time of his death Doré was working on illustrations for an edition of Shakespeare's plays.

Works

Doré was a prolific artist; thus the following list of works is not complete and it does not include his paintings, sculptures, and many of his journal illustrations:

Date	Author	Work	Volumes / Format	Illustrations	Publisher	Ref
1854	Gustave Doré	Histoire pittoresque dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie, d'après les chroniqueurs et historiens Nestor Nikan Sylvestre Karamsin Ségur etc.	1 vol.	500	Paris: de Bry
1854	Rabelais	Oeuvres contenant la vie de Gargantua et celle de Pantagruel...	1 vol. 4to.	Frontis. & 15	J.Bry Ainé, Paris
1855	Honoré de Balzac	Les Contes Drôlatiques		425	Société Générale de la Libraire, and in Le Journal pour Tous
1855	Jules Gérard	La Chasse au Lion	1 vol. 12mo.	11	Librairie Nouvelle
1856		Fierabras d'Alexandrie, Légende Nationale traduite par Mary Lafon	1 vol in 8vo	123	Librairie Nouvelle
1856	Victor Percival	Mémoires d'un Jeune Cadet, par Victor Percival		48
1856		La Légende du Juif Errant	1 vol. grand in folio	12 :Image:Wandering jew title page.jpg	Michel Lévy
1857	Dante Alighieri	L'Enfer		75
1857 autumn	Ed. de La Bédollière	Nouveau Paris, Histoire de ses 20 Arrondissements	1 vol in 4to	150	Barba
1857 autumn	Valéry Vernier	Aline, Journal d'un Jeune Homme		one large page	Dentu
1860–1862	Thomas Mayne Reid	L'Habitation du Désert	1 vol. in 16mo	60	Hachette
1860–1862	Ann S. Stevens	La Fille du Grand Chieftain	1 vol.	15
1860–1862	M. V. Victor	Flêche d'Or	1 vol.	13
1860–1862	E. S. Ellis	L'Ange des Frontières	1 vol.	10
1860–1862	N. W. Buxted	Les Vierges de la Forêt	1 vol.	10
1860	William Shakespeare	The Tempest	1 vol. in 4to
1861		Les Figures du Temps	1 vol. in 12mo
1861	Plouvier and Vincent	Les Chansons d'Autrefois	in 12mo		Coulon and Pineau, Paris
1861	Edmond About	Le Roi des Montagnes	1 vol. in 8vo	157	Hachette and Co., Paris
1862	Saintine	Les Mythologies du Rhin	1 vol. in 8vo	165	Hachette and Co., Paris
1862	L'Abbé Léon Godard	L'Espagne, Mœurs et Paysages	2 vols in 8vo	4 :Image:Moeurs et paysages title page.jpg	Alfred Mame et Fils, Tours :Image:Moeurs et paysages title page.jpg or Paris
1862	Malte-Brun	Les États Unis et le Mexique	1 vol. in 4to		Brun, Paris
1862		Histoire aussi intéressante qu'invraisemblable de l'intrépide Capitaine Castagnette, neveu de l'Homme à la Tête de Bois	1 vol. in 4to	43	Hachette
1862	Charles Perrault	Les Contes de Perrault		11
1862		Aventures du Baron de Münchausen, traduction nouvelle par Théophile Gautier fils	1 vol.
1863	M. Épiné	Légende de Croquemitaine	1 vol. in 4to	177	Hachette
1863	Gastineau	La Chasse au Lion et à la Panthère	1 vol. in 8vo		Hachette and Co.
1863	Miguel de Cervantes	Don Quixote de la Mancha translation by Louis Viardot	2 vols. folio	370	Hachette and Co., Paris, and Cassell and Co., London
1863	Charles Perrault	Les Contes de Perrault or in Spanish Los Cuentos de Perrault		100+	Hetzels. in Spanish by Ledouse
1865	Gastineau	De Paris en Afrique	1 vol. in 12mo
1865	A. Masse	L'Histoire d'un Minute	1 vol., 12mo
1866	Victor Hugo	Travailleurs de la Mer			Sampson Low and Co., London
1865	E. Edgar	Cressy and Poictiers	1 vol. in 8vo	50+
1865	Thomas Moore	L'Épicurien	in 8vo
1865	Tom Hood	Fairy Realm	in folio
1865	Quatrelles	Le Chevalier Beautemps	grand in 8vo
1865	Chateaubriand	Atala	2 vols, grand folio	80	Hachette Edition
1866	Théophile Gautier	Le Capitaine Fracasse	1 vol. grand in 8vo	60	Charpentier
1866	G. La Bédollière	Histoire de la Guerre en Mexique	in 4to
1866	Dante Alighieri	The Vision of Hell			London, Cassell, Petter, and Galpin
1867	Dante Alighieri	Il Purgatorio ed il Paradiso			Hachette and Co.
1866	X. B. Saintine	Le Chemin des Écoliers	1 vol. in 8vo	450 :Image:Le chemin des ecoliers title page.jpg	Hachette and Co.
1866		La Grande Bible de Tours, according to the Vulgate, new translation	2 vols. grand in folio	241	Mame, Tours; Cassell and Co., England
1866	John Milton	Paradise Lost		50 Plates	Cassell and Co.
1867	La Bédollière	La France et la Russie
1867		Les Fables de Lafontaine	2 vols. in folio	8 large and 250 small plates	Hachette and Co.
1867		Les Pays-bas et la Belgique	in 8vo
1870	Thomas Hood		2 vols. in folio	9 Plates	Ward and Lock, London
1873	Rabelais	New edition of Rabelais	2 vols. in folio		Paris : Garnier; London: Chatto and Windus
1876	Louis Énault	London	1 vol. in 4to	174 wood-engravings	Hachette and Co.
1874	Baron Ch. Davilliers	L'Espagne	in 4to	309 wood-engravings	Hachette and Co.; London: Sampson Low and Co.
1875	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	in folio	39 engraved plates and 3 vignettes	London: Doré Gallery
1875	Michaud	Histoire des Croisades	2 vol. medium folio	100 grand compositions	Paris: Hachette and Co.
	Alfred Tennyson	Idylls of the King
1877	Ariosto	Orlando Furioso		36 drawings	Hachette and Co.
1884	Edgar Allan Poe	The Raven		26 steel engravings	London: Sampson Low and Co., New York: Harper and Co.
1890	Gustave Doré	The Doré Bible Gallery		Illustrated by Gustave Doré	Philadelphia