Gustave Doré

Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré, known as Gustave Doré (UK: DOR-ay, US: dor-AY, French: [gystav dɔʁe]; January 6, 1832 – January 23, 1883), was a French printmaker, illustrator, painter, comics artist, caricaturist, and sculptor. He is best known for his prolific output of wood-engravings illustrating classic literature, especially those for the Vulgate Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy. These achieved great international success, making him renowned for printmaking, although his role was normally as the designer only; at the height of his career, some 40 block-cutters were employed to cut his drawings onto the wooden printing blocks.

He created over 10,000 illustrations, the most important of which were copied using an electrotype process with cylinder presses, allowing very large print runs to be published simultaneously in many countries. The most popular and successful French book illustrator of the mid-19th century, Doré became very widely known for his illustrations to books such as Dante's Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1862), and the Bible (1866), helping to give European currency to the illustrated book of large scale. His work is characterized by a rather naïve but highly spirited love of the grotesque and represents a commercialization of the Romantic taste for the bizarre.

Drawings of London done in 1869-71 were more sober studies of the poorer quarters of the city and captured the attention of van Gogh. In the 1870s, he also took up painting, producing some large and ambitious religious works.

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