For three decades, readers in Europe and America pictured the heroes and monsters of their favorite books through the drawings of Gustave Doré. Each image began as a drawing on a block of wood. Engravers cut his lines into it, and presses printed it by the thousand. Doré was twenty-two when his first big book appeared, and dead before his last went on sale.
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What Doré's Books Asked of Him
In Doré's day, a book illustration took two trades. The artist drew the scene directly on a block of wood. Engravers then cut away everything around his lines, so the block could sit beside the type and print with the text.
Doré drew fast, and his books grew to match his speed: dozens of full-page plates, in volumes more than forty centimeters tall. His ambition was to illustrate the great classics, and more than once he paid for a book with his own money.
Each entry below is a single plate, picked for what it tells about its book and about the moment in Doré's life when it was drawn. Together they cover his whole career, from the caricatures of his youth to the drawings of his final months, through the books people still look for and a few most lists skip.
12. The New Zealander (1872)
A cloaked figure perches on a fallen stone above the Thames, a sketchbook on his knees, drawing what is left of London. Under a full moon, the dome of St Paul's stands broken against the sky, and weeds grow over an empty wharf. The New Zealander is the last plate of a book about London at the height of its wealth, and it shows the city in ruins.
Doré was forty when that book appeared. Between 1869 and 1872 he had walked the capital with the journalist Blanchard Jerrold for London: A Pilgrimage, and nearly every plate records what the two men saw there, from the docks and the slums to the prisons and the crowds. Only the last one leaves the present behind.
The idea for that final plate came from a sentence that was already three decades old. In 1840, reviewing a history of the popes, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote that the Catholic Church might still be strong "when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."
Victorian readers repeated the line until it wore thin. By 1865 the comic magazine Punch put "Macaulay's New Zealander" on a list of phrases that deserved to be retired.
Doré took the tired phrase literally. He gave the traveler a body, a cloak and a pencil, sat him among the fallen stones, and let him study London the way visitors had long studied the ruins of Rome. Eight years later, the novelist William Delisle Hay borrowed the same vision for a book of his own, The Doom of the Great City.
I find it hard not to see Doré in that seated figure, a foreigner with a sketchbook drawing a city that was not his. After a book packed with crowded streets, he closed his London on a single man and an empty city.
At a Glance
Artist: Gustave Doré (1832 to 1883)
Made: 1872
Medium: Wood engraving after Doré's drawing
Size: Not published
Where to see it: London: A Pilgrimage (1872), last plate
11. History of Holy Russia (1854)
Almost the whole square is black, with a few flakes of snow falling across it. All around this panel, armies collide and two bearded chroniclers read aloud from their books. History of Holy Russia appeared in Paris in 1854, when Doré was twenty-two, and told a thousand years of Russian history in small comic panels. France had just gone to war with Russia, and a young caricaturist was mocking the enemy in a form that barely existed yet.