Gustave Doré gave Dante's Hell, Don Quixote and the Bible the faces that millions of readers still picture today. Born in Strasbourg on January 6, 1832, he became the most famous book illustrator of the nineteenth century and died in Paris on January 23, 1883.
He drew each design straight onto a block of wood. Woodcutters then carved away the wood around his lines, so that the block could be inked and printed like type. At the height of his career, more than forty of them worked from his drawings.
Yet Doré wanted to be remembered as a painter, and the critics of his day would not allow it.
In 1861, the year his illustrated Inferno made him famous across Europe, he sent a huge canvas to the Salon, the official exhibition in Paris where artists' careers were made. With it came a challenge: "I am my own rival. I must efface and kill the illustrator."
The rival he meant was his own success. To be taken seriously as a painter, Doré believed he first had to bury the man who drew for books.
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His story starts far from Paris, in Strasbourg, the main city of Alsace, close to the German border. He never trained in an academy, the kind of school where young artists of his time spent years copying plaster casts and live models.
Instead, the boy taught himself by making illustrated albums of his own. One model was the French caricaturist Grandville, famous for animals dressed and behaving like people. Another was the Swiss storyteller Rodolphe Töpffer, who told his tales in sequences of small drawings.
At fifteen, he took that self-taught hand to Paris, and within months a publisher of satirical papers had noticed it.
Paris at fifteen
Doré reached Paris in the autumn of 1847 and found work with the Aubert publishing house, a firm that sold prints and caricatures…
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