DORÉ, PAUL-GUSTAVE. — French engraver, painter, and sculptor, born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832, died in Paris on 23 January 1883.
His truly exceptional qualities as a draftsman and, above all, his ability to illustrate with vividly accentuated realism real events, fantastic scenes, and, at times, compositions of even transcendent content, earned him a very wide reputation in his day. In some of his works, such as the drawings for Balzac’s Contes drôlatiques (1885) or those illustrating the adventures of Rabelais, DORÉ indulges in a vein of irony that borders on satire; the same can be said of the illustrations for Don Quixote (1865). However, the most famous works of his immense output are the illustrations for the Divine Comedy (1861) and those for the Bible, published by him in 1864. Already a famous artist around 1870, DORÉ devoted himself almost entirely to painting first and then to sculpture, though without achieving in those fields the same success he had attained in illustration. Among his paintings are The Neophyte and Christ Leaving the Praetorium (London, G. D. Gallery), and among his sculptures the monument to Alexandre Dumas père (1882), erected in Paris in 1884.