Gustave Doré, un artiste
Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré (1832–1883) had all the characteristics of a visionary artistic mind:
- He was french, which seems to be a good starting point for being artistically inclined.
- He was born in 1832 like Eduard Manet, Gustave Eiffel, and Lewis Carroll.
- He died in 1883 like Eduard Manet(!), Karl Marx, and Richard Wagner.
- He was an untrained child prodigy, having his first illustrations published in Paris at the age of fifteen.
- He excelled in different artistic media such as oil painting, aquarelle, sculptoring, and of course the wood engravings, that earned him a name among the greatest illustrators of all time. Besides this he was a skilled violinist and an experienced mountaineer as well.
- He mastered a diverse range of genres from his dramatic mythological and religious scenes over the satirical caricatures to the documentaristic social-realistic portrait and the serene mountain landscapes.
- He was extremely productive with over 400 oil paintings, several hundred aquarelles, and more than 10.000 engravings attributed to him.
The Doré Bible
Doré illustrated everything from classic european litterature to contemporary american poetry. Some of his illustrations for Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Cervantes’ Don Quixote has been permanently etched in the collective consciousness of the art world. But his most famous and widely recognised illustrations are the 288 engrawings he made for a new illustrated English Bible published in 1866, commonly known as the Doré Bible. These illustrations later found their way into a plethora of Bible editions and translations, influencing and informing the imaginations of generations of Bible readers.
The users of BibleOn, a mobile Bible reading app developed and maintained by 2K/Denmark, are able to buy a collection of more than 200 of these illustrations and enhance their bible reading experience with the picturesque world as imagined by Gustave Doré.
List of selected works illustrated by Doré
1847: Labours of Hercules (105 engravings)
1854: François Rabelais, Complete Works (105 engravings)
1855: Honoré de Balzac, Droll Stories (425 engravings)
1861: Dante, Inferno (76 engravings)
1862: Charles Perrault, Fairy Tales (42 engravings)
1862: Rudolf Erich Raspe, Baron Munchausen (158 engravings)
1863: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (377 engravings)
1866: The Doré Bible (288 engravings)
1867: Jean de La Fontaine, Fables (334 engravings)
1868: Dante, Purgatory & Paradise (60 engravings)
1868: Alfred, Lord Tennyson Idylls of the King (37 engravings)
1872: Blanchard Jerrold, London, a Pilgrimage (180 engravings)
1876: Samuel T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (42 engravings)
1883: Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven (26 engravings)
