Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was born the middle of three brothers in Strasbourg
in Eastern France in 1832. and His artistic ability was obvious from an early age. He
drew obsessively and even taught himself how to create lithographs by the age of 12.
When he was 15 he travelled to Paris with his family and took the opportunity to show
some of his drawings to Charles Philipon, the publisher of Le Journal Pour Rire.
Philipon was so impressed that he immediately offered Dore regular work, and so without
any formal art education and by anyone's definition still only a boy, he began a career as a professional
illustrator. The first work published was Les Travaux d'Hercule
in 1847, and although some way distant from his mature technique these early images clearly
indicated a major visual talent in the making. When Doré's father died from pleurisy in
1849, he took his widowed mother in to live with him in his Paris apartment, and the two
lived together up to her death. In 1851 he had two more humorous volumes published
by Le Journal Pour Rire. Trois Artistes Incompris et Mécontens featured more loose gestural
cartoons created by drawing directly onto lithographic stones.
And the same year saw the equally successful publication of Les Dés-agréments d'un Voyage
d'Agrément. In 1853 the album Les Collegiens featured many satirical visual comments on
student and academic life, and significantly this was his first collection to be reproduced
as wood engravings. From this point on all his illustrations were
engraved, and he followed Les Collegiens in 1854 with L'Histoire de la Sainte Russie,
a comedic history of the Russian Empire. This was the last in the series and it seems
that at this point he left Le Journal and struck out on his own.
His illustrated edition of the works of François Rabelais, published in the same year, was
his first foray into what might be justifiably called classic literature, even though it
was still humorous in nature. The large number of engraved drawings he produced
for this book brought Doré's work to a more literary readership, and critical praise now
began to come his way. In the following year he created similar mages
for an edition of Balzac's Les Contes Drôlatiques, which although set in medieval France had
originally been published in 1832. And this proved to be every bit as well recieved as
his work for Rabelais. In 1856 he tackled more serious-minded material
with 12 illustrations for The Legend of The Wandering Jew, a poem by Pierre-Jean de Béranger
which was inspired by a fiercely antisemitic novel written by Eugène Sue in 1845. What
few examples of Dore's original images have survived show that his drawings were considerably
more gestural than the finished engraved version. In 1858 The Adventures of St. George, written
by W. F. Peacock, was published in London. Unusually, this edition was sold as hand coloured
engravings, with washes applied over the original monochromes by teams of colourists. But it
wasn't a particularly successful experiment, and it was never repeated in his lifetime.
This was followed in 1860 by a British publication of Shakespeares last play The Tempest, and
although he only created a handful of illustrations for the book, each one evoked the relevant
selection from the script with imagination and visual energy
he had been planning to illustrate Dante's 14th century epic The Divine Comedy for some
years, but he had not been able to find a publisher willing to take on the project.
So in 1861 he self-financed the publication of the first section, The Inferno. The series
of visionary images he produced and had engraved at his own expense were breathtaking in their
evocation of Dante's verse. As one critic wrote at the time "We are inclined
to believe that the conception and the interpretation come from the same source, that Dante and
Doré are communicating by occult and solemn conversations".
1862 saw the publication of 3 more significant books.
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, an amalgamation of the earlier tales of the Grimm's and Hans
Andersen tales, allowed Doré to indulge himself with highly imaginative illustrations, and
to bring out the menace of the dark tales taken from the Brothers Grimm.
The second book of 1862 was the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, for which he created
a body of drawings of varying levels of complexity, all of which enhanced the riotous absurdity
of the Baron's fabricated achievements. And like many of Doré's illustrated classics
his has become the definitive visualisation. The last in this year was Xavier Saintine's
La Mythologie du Rhin, a strange parody of Germanic legends which veered wildly between
comedy and tragedy, featuring vignetted spot illustrations throughout the book.
In 1863 he published what has come to be considered one of the most significant, enduring and
definitive illustrated editions of Cervantes' Don Quixote of La Mancha. His illustrations
were by turns funny and tragic and occasionally both simultaneously, and quite a few have
become iconic in their own right. This was another perfect marriage of text and image
and another demonstration of Doré's intuitive understanding of which works of literature
would best suit his illustrative abilities and inclinations.
Le Capitain Fracasse, written by Théophile Gautier had originally been published in 1863,
but Doré's illustrated edition followed in 1866, and of course greatly enhanced the appeal
of the original comedic text. But even more remarkable was the volume and
pictorial quality of the other work published in that year.
First and perhaps foremost his illustrations from the Bible featured around 250 astonishingly
complex evocations of both the old and new testament. The commission had actually begun
in 1862 and the publishers had originally wanted him to travel to the Holy Land to make
sketches and studies to inform the completed illustrations, but he was having none of it
and instead spent 4 years in his Paris studio creating the drawings, using reference books
to set the scenes. The result was a massive popular, critical and financial success.
And in the same year, in a remarkable demonstration of creativity and productivity Doré also
published an edition of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, originally written in
1667. This account of humanity's fall from grace and the struggle between good and evil
provided him with another perfect opportunity to create yet another spectacular et of fantasy
images of immense dramatic and aesthetic appeal. Although I'm concentrating on Doré's career
in illustration, and it was easily the dominant aspect of his output, it's worth remembering
that he also had a parallel successful career as an artist.
I don't know whether I just didn't search hard enough but the earliest dated oil painting
I found was from 1860, at which point he had already been illustrating for about 13 years.
He mostly concerned himself with breathtakingly beatific religious subject matter, but he
also created equally stirring evocations of classical mythology. He even painted versions
of some of his engraved work, which gives us an insight of what his illustrations would
have been if colour print had been available to him
He was also active as a sculptor of bronze cast figures, some of which were also religious,
although he was equally well known for his more lighthearted secular pieces.
In 1867 200 of his earlier humorous illustrations were published in one volume in Britain and
the collection sold in conspicuously large numbers. In the same year there was an exhibition
of his work in London, and its spectacular success led to the establishment of a permanent
Doré gallery. Les Fables de la Fontaine was published in
the following year, and he produced a largely humorous and fanciful body of images, to accompany
this verse translation of Aesop's Fables. He brought the same aesthetic control to these
images as he had in his more spiritual works and happily played with the comedic possibilities
of anthropomorphic techniques in many of the illustrations he produced for this highly
successful series. In 1868 the two remaining parts of the Divine
Comedy, Purgatory and Paradise were published as one volume, and not only was it successful
in itself, but now with the whole book completed it was also subsequently re-published in its
entirety many times over in coming years. He also illustrated The Idylls of the King,
a collection of twelve poems about the Arthurian legend by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was
published as one volume in 1868, and this was yet another worthy and highly engrossing
series of dramatic engravings. In 1869 he began a collaboration with the
English playwright and author Blanchard Jerrold on an illustrated book about life in contemporary
London. Doré signed a contract with the publishers
that involved living in London for three months a year so he could make sketches from observation,
and the project was completed and published in 1872. It enjoyed great commercial success,
although some critics weren't all that pleased about the book's focus on poverty and urban
blight.
Published in 1875 Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner proved to be another
perfect literary match for his facility for dramatic composition and theatrical lighting
effects. And although Doré was prone to complain at length about the supposed inferior quality
of the engravings made from his originals, this was surely another example that this
opinion was unjustified. This was equally true of the second project
published in that year, which was his visual account of the Crusades, which combined convincing
evocations of the conflict and more propagandist fantasy religious depictions.
1877 saw the publication of Ludovico Ariosto's 16th century poem Orlando Furioso, for which
he provided a series of compelling illustrations to illuminate the extravagantly fanciful and
occasionally grotesque narrative. In 1880 a combined volume of the middle eastern
tales of Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba was published, and this collection featured a
wide range of full page and vignetted monochromes which successfully brought these oriental
fantasies to credible life for the reader. Several of the sources I used assert that
1883's edition of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven was reproduced as steel engravings, and point
out that this allowed for the reproduction of finer descriptive line work. And although
this is the only substantiated instance it does suggest that several others may well
have been created this way. The book was a major creative triumph and
another clear demonstration of the symbiotic pairing of illustrator and author.
Sadly it was also his last work, because that was the year in which he died in Paris following
a heart attack at the age of only 51. But having started his career so young Doré
had nevertheless managed a spectacularly successful 35 year career, in which time he had created
around 10,000 illustrations, in addition to his paintings and sculptures.
Even now his images continue to be published in books and sold as posters and the dramatic
power of his remarkable body of narrative fantasy illustration continues to be an inspiration
to subsequent generations.