Gustave Doré
Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was French artist known for his illustrations and paintings. But perhaps best known of his illustrations of the Divine Comedy of Dante and his illustrated Bible. Which are only some of his many works.
He was an illustrator, draftsman, lithographer, printmaker, painter, engraver, sculptor, a musician and acrobat (even able to walk on his hands). But worked primarily with wood engraving. I would say he was a renaissance man in his time.
Doré was mainly celebrated for his paintings in his day. His paintings remain world renowned, but his woodcuts and engravings, like those he did for Jerrold, are where he really excelled as an artist with an individual vision. He was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832. But By age five he was best known as a troublemaker for playing pranks that were mature beyond his years. Seven years later he started carving into cement. He moved to Paris at the age of fifteen and began working as caricaturist for a French paper. He quickly established himself as a technical skilful and artist.
He later went on to win commissions to
depict scenes from books by Dante, Milton, Balzac and Rebelais. Doré had big
fans already among his contemporaries. In 1853, He was asked to illustrate the
works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for
British publishers, including a new illustrated English Bible.
In 1856 he produced twelve folio-size illustrations of The Legend of The Wandering Jew for
a short poem, which Pierre-Jean de Ranger had derived from a novel of Eugène Sue.
In the 1860s he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
His depictions of the knight and his squire had become so famous that they have
influenced a lot of 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 undertaking that earned him 30,000 francs from
publisher Harper & Brothers in 1883. His illustration for the English
Bible was a huge
success that Doré had a major exhibition of some of his
works in London. The exhibition was also a success that it led to the creation of
the Doré Gallery located in New
Bond Street In
1869.
Blanchard Jerrold, the son of Douglas William Jerrold, suggested
that they work together to produce a large portrait of London. Taking
inspiration from "The Microcosm of London" produced by Rudolph
Ackermann, William Pyne, and Thomas Rowlandson in 1808.
Doré signed a
five-year contract with the publishers Grant & Co with the agreement for
him to stay in London for three months a year for that he received a big sum of
£10,000 a year for the a
Extremely high amount at that time.
In1872 the book, London: A Pilgrimage that contained 180 engravings by Doré was
released. It received a lot of commercial and popular success, but many
contemporary critics disliked it. Some
of them were concerned with the fact that Doré appeared to focus on the poverty
that existed in parts of London. The Art Journal accused him 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”. However
with the financial success of the book,
He received commissions from many other
British publishers, and also worked for the ' Illustrated London News. With which
his work appeared in their weekly newspaper The Illustrated London News. In his laboratory he had at times
of greater activity, more than forty illustrators, between employees and
students.
His
later work included illustrations for new editions of Coleridge's Mariner, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Tennyson’s The Idylls
of the King, The Works of Thomas Hood, and The Divine Comedy.
Doré
never married. With the death of his father in 1849, he continued to live with
his mother, illustrating books until his death in Paris following a short
illness on 23 of January 1883 . He was buried at cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris. In1861
The government of France made him a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur
(which is the highest
decoration in France).
Perhaps
what Doré is
most known for is his illustrations
of Dante’s Divine Comedy. They both are so intimately connected that even after
hundred and fifty years since it was first published his concept of Dante’s
story still determines what we imagine when the comedy is read or heard. He
planned it in early 1855. They were first in a series which he referred to as “masterpieces
of literature.”
Doré had already illustrated other
great works of Homer, Ossian, Byron,
Goethe, Racine, and Corneille. Dante’s Comedy was placed at top of these great
works because by 1850s it was the popular within the French mainstream culture.
His choice to illustrate Dante’s Inferno as the first of his illustrated
masterpieces of literature reflects Dante’s popularity in France in the 1860s.
He found it difficult to secure a publisher who was willing to take on the expense
of producing the expensive folio edition the he wanted. In 1861 he decided to
finance the publication of the first book in the Inferno series himself.
The
production was an immediate artistic and commercial success.
Confident by Doré's Inferno’s edition popularity, Hachette then went on to
publish Purgatorio and Paradiso in 1868 as a single volume.
Doré's Dante illustrations appeared in about 200
editions afterwards, with translations from the poet's original Italian available in
multiple languages. Few of Doré's literary series enjoyed as greatly success as
his Commedia illustrations.
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