Gustave Doré

Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré is a French illustrator, engraver, cartoonist, painter and sculptor. He was born on January 6, 1832 in Strasbourg, and died on January 23, 1883 in Paris, in his hotel in the Rue Saint-Dominique. He enjoyed international recognition during his lifetime.

From his childhood, Gustave Doré, endowed with a sharp sense of observation, shows a singular talent for drawing. His great curiosity allows him to multiply eclectic sketches (intimate or urban scenes, mythological or antiquity). His fertile imagination is nourished by readings and early inspirations exceptional for his age.

His first albums of known drawings are dated 1842. Influenced by Grandville, Hetzel editions, with Scenes of the private and public life of the Animals published in 1830, his albums testify of astonishing professionalism with the presence of title page, Legends of illustrations and tables of matter. With a humorous and vivacious tone, Gustave Doré chains the independent scenes using anthropomorphism.

In 1840, the father of Gustave Doré, Jean-Philippe Doré, polytechnicien, was appointed chief engineer of the Ponts et Chaussées de l'Ain and the Doré family settled in Bourg-en-Bresse. A student at the Royal College of Bourg, the current Lycée Lalande, he is inspired by Cham, Grandville and Rodolphe Töpffer, the child with early donations is a very good student of the college but he is even more noted by his caricatures and drawings Inspired by the Bressan world that surrounds it. His style is refined: his previously stiff line becomes more supple and nervous in wider and more detailed scenes with street decorations and visions of moving crowds.

At the age of 13, in 1845, three lithographs from these paintings Bressans printed in Bourg, are his first published works.

The Parisian publisher Charles Philipon proposes to him to settle in Paris where from 1847 it follows the courses of the Lycée Charlemagne. He begins to draw at the same time cartoons for the Journal for laughter from 1848 Philippon.

In 1845, he met Charles Philipon, director of the publishing house Aubert & Cie and founder of the satirical newspapers La Caricature (prohibited by the press laws of 1835) and Le Charivari is decisive. Charles Philipon proposes a three-year contract to Gustave Doré, aged 15, allowing him to produce a weekly page of drawings in the new newspaper Le Journal pour laugh conditioned to the pursuit of his studies and a remuneration. Gustave Doré created 1,379 vignettes for this newspaper.

His hope in becoming a caricaturist in this newspaper is to make himself known in the microcosm of Paris to be able to impose himself later as a painter. He quickly became the cartoonist of the newspaper and was distinguished by his graphic innovation and sharp irony. Anxious to please the intellectual circles and the powerful, he was careful not to venture into the political or social field to avoid any controversy. His drawings in the paper resemble those made by his colleagues. On the other hand, he distinguishes himself in his narratives in pictures where his graphic innovation is displayed. During his childhood, he had realized such projects with The Adventures of Mistenflûte and Mirliflor or with Histoire de Calypso.

His first album, influenced by Rodolphe Töpffer, Les travaux d'Hercule is lithographed in 1847, in oblong format, by Aubert & Cie in the "Jabot" collection. This series was inaugurated by a counterfeit version of The History of Monsieur Jabot and two pirated titles of Rodolphe Töpffer and the albums of Cham. As Thierry Groensteen points out, Les Travaux d'Hercule is part of "the first collection of comic books in the history of French publishing". This album shows a supple line, with pen and lithographic ink on the stone, with a maximum of three boxes per page and brief legends that allude to the parodic comic of the drawings. From this chain of squares, movement, duration and dynamism arise.

He quickly became famous and started in 1848 at the Salon with two pen drawings but continued to live with his mother after his father's death in 1849.

In 1851, two albums Three misunderstood and disgruntled artists and Des-agréments d'un voyage d'amenment are published at Aubert. Freed from the inspiration of Rodolphe Töppfer and the respect of the executives, Gustave Doré realizes vignettes freely arranged with several dimensions. The plurality of the composition of the pages, its innovations and its graphic variants are mostly depicted in Des-agréments d'un voyage d'agrément. His technique uses lithographic pencil, direct drawing on the stone.

From 1851, while exhibiting his paintings, he made some sculptures of religious subjects and collaborated with various magazines including the Journal pour tous. In 1854, the publisher Joseph Bry published an edition of the works of Rabelais, illustrated with a hundred of his engravings. From 1861 to 1868 he illustrated the Divine Comedy of Dante.

Increasingly recognized, Gustave Doré illustrates, between 1852 and 1883, more than one hundred and twenty volumes which appear in France, but also in England, Germany and Russia.

During the Crimean campaign, in 1854, he realized as a writer and as an illustrator, a picturesque, dramatic and caricatural history of holy Russia, a charge against this country with which France and England had entered the war . Considered as the last of Gustave Doré's comic books, the only openly political one, it was realized in the context of a large nationalist movement with the beginning of the Crimean War and revived the Western cliché of Russian barbarism .

Made up of more than 500 vignettes, challenging the codes of layout and drawing, this violent political pamphlet summarizes the bloody history of Russia from the origins to the contemporary period of Gustave Doré. The disproportionate character of the scenes of wars, massacres, assassinations, tortures provokes more smile than grimaces of terror. Jubilation is celebrated both verbally and graphically. As David Kunzle points out, "Doré puts his graphic fantasies in tune with his verbal extravagances, indulging in the joys of the pun to such an extent that it is often the perspective of a play on words that justifies the choice of an episode . "

It is an album that prefigures comics, where it plays on the discrepancy between text and illustration, and where it uses amazing graphic tricks.

Paul Lafon, a writer and publisher, whom he met at Philipon, accepted his request to illustrate the works of Rabelais. In 1854, the book was published by Bry with 99 vignettes and 14 plates, not including text engraved on wood. This affordable edition, with poor print quality and a modest format (a large in-octavo) is not up to Gustave Doré's strong ambitions. In 1854 and 1873 he illustrated two versions of the "Works of Rabelais", and in 1855: The Hundred Contes drolatiques of Honore de Balzac.

In 1856 he illustrated with a hand of painter, Le Jeif errant, a poem put into music by Pierre Dupont, a work of rupture in his artistic journey and in the history of woodcutting. Gustave Doré chooses the technique of wood of hue (interpretive engraving), abandoning the usually privileged copper engraving. The latter allows an infinite palette of tones, very close to the pictorial effects. The wood of tint makes it possible to draw directly in the wash and the gouache on blocks of wood of end (cut in slices perpendicular to the trunk) whose hard surface is worked with chisel. Doré has formed its own school of engravers. Each plate of the work, with a short legend from the poem, is a work of painting. The important format of the book allows the passage to films folio. The image is independent of the text. This work is a great public success.

Gustave Doré wishes to deploy his talent in illustrating the great works of literature, suffering from the observed disregard for caricature and topicality. He will list thirty masterpieces in the epic, comic or tragic genre of his ideal library, wishing to illustrate them in the same format as The Wandering Jew, Dante's Hell, Perrault's Tales, Don Quixote, Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, Milton or Shakespeare. The publishers refuse to produce these luxurious publications of too great a cost. Gustave Doré must self-publish Dante's work in 1861. Critical and popular success saluted the striking congruity of the engravings on the text. A critic will assert that: "The author is crushed by the draftsman. More than Dante illustrated by Doré, it is Doré illustrated by Dante. "

In the 1860s, he illustrated the Bible, published in 1866 and "The Hell of Dante". In 1861 and 1862, he traveled to Spain with Baron Jean Charles Davillier. The story will be published in the magazine "The Tour of the world", with engravings, real documents on everyday life in this country, as well as bullfights.

He then frequented social society and expanded his pictorial activities. He composed large paintings such as Dante and Virgil in the ninth circle of Hell (1861 - 311 × 428 cm - Musée de Brou), L'Enigme (at the Musée d'Orsay ) Or Christ leaving the courtroom (1867-1872 - 600 × 900 cm - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg).

In 1861, he exhibited a monumental canvas Dante and Virgil in the ninth circle of Hell. Most critics will criticize, from this date, and recurringly to his painting to be an enlarged illustration. Indeed, Gustave Doré's painting influenced the illustration of his literary works by choosing formats, the sense of composition, honoring the decor and his art of staging. Gustave Doré multiplies the points of view, in diving, low angle, panoramic or frontal planes with a search for maximum effectiveness of the image. Gustave Doré is the first illustrator to have used the image as an essential spring of suspense. According to Ray Harryhausen, famous special effects designer, "Gustave Doré would have been a great chief operator, he looks at things with the view of the camera. Indeed, in the engravings he devotes to the city of London, with his stations and his permanent crowd, the gaze is positioned so as to grip and follow the constant movement.

Multiplying at the same time drawings and illustrations of all kinds (fantastic, portraits-loads), his notoriety spreads to Europe, he meets a huge success in England with the Doré Gallery that opens in London in 1869.

In 1875, the illustration of Samuel Coleridge's poem: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner published in London by the Doré Gallery is one of his greatest masterpieces.

His art of composition reached its peak with London, a Pilgrimage by Blanchard Jerrold, a true report on the London of the late nineteenth century, where all social classes were present, his inspiration was particularly striking in the description of the London shallows.

During the commune of Paris he took refuge at Versailles.

His mother died in 1879.

Paradoxically, Gustave Doré approached his work of illustrator in the costume of a painter while his painting was constantly gauged according to his talent as illustrator. This judgment terribly affected Gustave Doré, despairing of being recognized as a painter. Throughout his artistic journey, Gustave Doré had an equal commitment in painting and illustration without seeing any incompatibility. It will be necessary to wait until the last ten years so that it approaches the illustration only as an activity allowing him to finance "its colors and its brushes".

The remark of Marie Jeanne Geyer sums up the artistic journey of Gustave Doré: "Yet it is in the shadow of painting that Gustave Doré invents in spite of himself a modern imagery in which appears, through an innovative and expressive drawing and bets In a scene condensing all the dramatic tension of a story, a new way of apprehending the illustration. The whole of Doré's modernity consists in this remoteness of the illustrated text and in the invention of a particular language which seems strangely to precede the narrative by letting a definitive image emerge. "

He died of a heart attack at the age of 51, on January 23, 1883, leaving an impressive work of more than ten thousand pieces, which will subsequently exert a strong influence on many illustrators. His friend Ferdinand Foch organized the funeral at Sainte-Clotilde, the funeral at Père-Lachaise12 and a farewell dinner at 73 rue Saint-Dominique.

In 1931, Henri Leblanc published a catalog raisonné with 9,850 illustrations, 68 music titles, 5 posters, 51 original lithographs, 54 washings, 526 drawings, 283 watercolors, 133 paintings and 45 sculptures. The museum of Brou in Bourg-en-Bresse, keeps 136 works of all kinds (oil painting, drawings, sculptures).

works:
1847: The Works of Hercules
1851: Three artists misunderstood and unhappy
1851: Des-agréments of a pleasure trip, Féchoz and Letouzey (Paris). Reissued by Editions 2024 in 2013
1854: Picturesque, dramatic and caricatural history of the holy Russia, J. Bry aîné (Paris). Reissued by the Editions 2024 and by the Douin editions (with recomposition of the text to the original) in 2014
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