Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832. An illustrator, engraver, painter and sculptor, he is best known for his wood engravings. His talent showed early: at 15, he began his career as a caricaturist for Le Journal pour rire.
The turning point came in 1861. He published his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno at his own expense, and that same year he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. His engravings for the Bible, in 1866, were a huge success. Doré also illustrated Don Quixote, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. His grand and often strange fantasies made him one of the most prolific and admired illustrators of his time.
Yet Doré dreamed of being recognised as a painter. France shunned his canvases, but England loved them: after a major exhibition in London in 1867, the Doré Gallery opened on Bond Street. With the writer Blanchard Jerrold, he published London: A Pilgrimage in 1872. Its 180 engravings set the luxury of the rich against the poverty of the slums, and these images would later inspire Van Gogh.
Doré died in Paris on 23 January 1883, aged 51. He was then working on an illustrated edition of Shakespeare. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. His dark and grandiose imagination fascinated even H. P. Lovecraft, and it still feeds fantasy and illustration today.
