Gustave Doré (1832-1883)
Though Gustave Doré aimed to be an artist in the grand manner, in emulation of Michelangelo, it was as an illustrator that he satisfied his ambitions and achieved his greatest fame. His choice of classic texts allowed him the opportunity to exercise his extravagant imagination and produce images of sublime power.
Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832. He drew intensively through his childhood, and mastered lithography at the age of eleven while studying at the Lycée in Bourg-en-Bresse. Passing through Paris in 1847, he visited Charles Philipon, the founder of Caricature and Charivari, and impressed him with some of his drawings. As a result, Philipon published his Les travaux d’Hercule and persuaded his parents to set him up in the capital.
So he undertook a three-year contract to produce a weekly drawing for Philipon’s Journal Pour Rire while yet completing his education at the Lycée Charlemagne.
Though mainly self-taught as an artist, he made regular visits during this period to the atelier of Henri Scheffer, the academy of Alexandre Dupuis, the Louvre and the Bibliothèque Nationale. He exhibited pen and ink drawings (1848) and a painting (1850) at the Salon but made his name with his wood-engraved illustrations to Rabelais (1854). This instigated an entire series of classic titles in French and English editions displaying a mastery of grotesque horror and humour. These included Dante’s L’Enfer (1861) and Le Purgatoire et le paradis (1868), Cervantes’ Don Quichotte de la Manche (1863), La Sainte Bible (1866), and La Fontaine’s Fables (1868). Despite his renown as an illustrator, he aspired to be a great artist, and exhibited paintings, and later sculpture, at the Paris Salon; both were poorly received.
The British public came to know Doré through his contributions to the Illustrated London News (from 1853), especially those concerning the Crimean War (1855-56 and 1858). His success in England led him, in 1868, to open his own gallery in New Bond Street, London. It remained in operation for a number of years and published some of his later volumes, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1875) [4]. In the late 1860s, he began to prepare a book on London, with a text by Douglas Jerrold, but this appeared only in 1872, and in a diminished form, with the title London: A Pilgrimage. A parallel scheme for Paris never materialised.
Throughout his career, Doré had continued to live with, and support, his mother, so that her death in 1881 was a severe blow. Two years later, on 23 January 1883, he died in Paris from a heart attack.
Further Reading:
Nigel Gosling, Gustave Doré, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973
Blanchard Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré, London: W H Allen & Co Ltd, 1891 (with complete bibliography)
Joanna Richardson, Gustave Doré, London: Cassell, 1980
Millicent Rose, Gustave Doré, London: Pleiades Books, 1946
His work is represented in the collections of the British Museum and the V&A; the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (Strasbourg) and Musée d’Orsay (Paris); the State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg); and the Art Institute of Chicago, Dahesh Museum of Art (Greenwich, CT), Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA).
