Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832, on the rue de la Nuée-Bleue. The pictures treat a page as a crowd. Figures fill the sheet. The woodcut is packed, sometimes black, always abundant. A face can sit inside a mass of other faces. A body can read as both person and a pattern of lines. A wood block can hold a city of bodies, with the light left in the gaps.

In 1847 he drew for Charles Philipon's Journal pour rire. The sheets already treat a page as a crowd in line. In 1855 he illustrated Rabelais. The weekly and the book stay one surface: figures packed into the wood, a dark mass that fills the rectangle.

In 1861 Hachette issued his Dante Inferno, and a large Inferno painting was shown at the Salon. Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell, painted that year, is more than four metres wide; it is now at the Musée de Brou. Don Quixote followed in 1863; the Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost in 1866; La Fontaine in 1867. Roland furieux came in 1879, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven in 1883. The same packed woodcut runs through the folios: a dark crowd on the page, whether the subject is Hell, a knight, Genesis, or a fable.

On 7 December 1867 he signed with Fairless & Beeforth for the Doré Gallery in London. London. A Pilgrimage was published in 1872, with fifty-two full-page woodcuts and a hundred and forty-six cuts in the text. Between 1867 and 1872 he painted Le Christ quittant le prétoire, oil on canvas, 609 by 914 centimetres. It hung at the London gallery from 1868, remained on view there through 1892, then toured North America from 1892 to 1898, opening at Carnegie Music Hall in New York. In 1988 it entered the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, in a room given to the Strasbourg-born painter.

The Département des Estampes et de la photographie at the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds 4,221 works in thirty-four albums, all digitized: 48 etchings, 389 lithographs, and 3,784 illustrations. In 2014 the Musée d'Orsay showed Gustave Doré, l'imagination au pouvoir from 18 February to 11 May; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa showed it from 12 June to 14 September. Those shows pushed the BnF holdings into item-by-item cataloging. He was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur on 13 August 1861 and officier on 15 January 1879. He died in Paris, on the rue Saint-Dominique, on 23 January 1883, at one in the morning. Alexandre Dumas fils and Paul Dalloz spoke at the funeral.