Gustave Dore

Gustave Dore was the most reproduced illustrator of the nineteenth century and is the reason a great deal of European literature has a standard visual form. He was a prodigy from Strasbourg who was publishing lithographs at fifteen and never had formal training. Working with wood-engraving teams who cut his drawings for the press, he illustrated Rabelais, Balzac, Cervantes, Milton, Coleridge, Poe, Perrault's fairy tales, the Bible and, above all, Dante. The Inferno plates of 1857 are the ones that fixed the poem in the general imagination: the dark wood, the crowds of the damned turning in the wind, the ice at the bottom. He financed the Dante himself when publishers refused it, and it sold out immediately. He produced on an industrial scale - some ten thousand plates - and made a great deal of money, while being dismissed by French critics who thought illustration a lesser trade and his painting, which he cared about most, second-rate. London: A Pilgrimage, made with the journalist Blanchard Jerrold in 1872, is a different achievement entirely: engravings of railway slums, opium dens, the docks and the workhouse that Van Gogh studied and that remain among the most-used images of Victorian poverty. He was never elected to the Academy of Fine Arts. He died at fifty-one, unmarried, having lived with his mother. His Bible illustrations of 1866 were reprinted in hundreds of editions and are the reason a great many people picture biblical scenes the way they do. The London engravings were criticised at the time for exaggeration, and subsequent photographic evidence suggests he was, if anything, restrained. He also worked in sculpture and left a large monument to Alexandre Dumas in Paris.

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