Doré

Doré, GUSTAVE, painter and illustrator of books, was born at Strasburg, 6th January 1833. In 1845 he came to Paris, at the age of fifteen began to exhibit landscape subjects in pen and ink in the Salon; in 1848 he became a contributor to the Journal pour rire, and he was afterwards on the staff of the Journal pour tous. He first made his mark by his illustrations to Rabelais (1854), to Sue's Wandering Jew, and to Balzac's Contes Drolatiques (1856), which fully displayed his facility of execution and his fantastic power of invention. These were followed by innumerable illustrated editions of other well-known works; in 1861 by Dante's Inferno, in 1863 by the Contes of Perrault, in 1863 by Don Quixote, in 1868 by the Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante, in 1865-66 by the Bible, in 1866 by Paradise Lost, in 1867-68 by Tennyson's Idylls of the King, in 1867 by La Fontaine's Fables, and many other series of designs, the latest of which became poor and feeble in character, the artist having exhausted himself by incessant over-production. Doré was also ambitious of ranking as an historical painter, and he executed much in colour. He himself said that between 1850 and 1870 he earned £280,000 by his pencil. Among the earliest of his pictures are 'The Battle of the Alma,' and 'The Battle of Inkermann,' shown in the Salons of 1855 and 1857. Two of his most successful oil-pictures are 'Paolo and Francesca da Rimini' (1863), and 'The Neophyte' (1868). His 'Tobit and the Angel' is in the Luxembourg Gallery. For many years there was a Doré gallery in London, filled with his works, which were more popular there than in France, among which the enormous canvases of 'Christ leaving the Pretorium' (1867-72) and 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem' figured prominently. He is, however, seen at his best in his book-illustrations, for his colouring is unreal and wanting in delicacy and harmoniousness, and he had no technical mastery over the methods of oil-painting. He is most successful in subjects of a weirdly humorous or grotesque class; but he fails completely in the religious scenes which he so often set himself to depict. He displayed some ability as a sculptor. He exhibited a colossal vase decorated with figures at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1878; and at the time of his death, 23d January 1883, he was engaged upon a monument to the elder Dumas. See Lives by Miss Roosevelt (Lond. 1886) and B. Jerrold (1891).