Gustave Doré was a French artist, born in Strasbourg in 1832, who died in Paris in 1883 and became the most famous book illustrator of the nineteenth century. His engravings for Dante's Inferno, Don Quixote and the Bible gave millions of readers the pictures they still carry in their heads. He wanted to be remembered as a painter, and the critics of his day would not allow it.
Picture Hell as Dante described it, or a gaunt knight charging a windmill, and the image in your head was very likely drawn by Doré. He made the designs himself. A team of more than forty woodcutters then carved them into blocks for the printing press, which let him fill more than ninety illustrated books with his pictures.
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In 1861 Doré's illustrated Inferno made him famous across Europe. The same year he sent a huge painting of Dante and Virgil to the Salon in Paris, and he declared what he was after: "I am my own rival. I must efface and kill the illustrator."
Paris would not let him. The Musée d'Orsay says the critics rejected him much as they rejected Manet, and that the art world distrusted his versatility between 1860 and 1870. When he took up sculpture, the critic Castagnary looked at his Fate and Love, shown at the Salon in 1877, and argued that Doré had no talent for it. Doré was bitterly upset.
So he built a stage elsewhere. In 1867 and 1868 he helped found the Doré Gallery on New Bond Street in London, a permanent room for his enormous religious canvases. The man France filed under illustrator now had a gallery of his own paintings in another country. It did not end the argument, and the argument runs through the rest of his life.
What You'll Discover
How a boy from Strasbourg reached Paris.
The book that gave Hell its face.
Why he crossed Spain for a knight.
How his Bible entered family homes.
What he saw in London at night.
Why his paintings disappeared.