Doré, Paul-Gustave

DORÉ, PAUL-GUSTAVE. - French engraver, painter and sculptor, b. in Strasbourg on 6 Jan. 1832, d. in Paris on 23 Jan. 1883.

His truly exceptional qualities as a draughtsman and above all his faculty for illustrating with veristic accents, strongly emphasized, real events, fantastic scenes and, at times, compositions of even transcendental content, created for him in his own day a very wide fame. In some of his works, such as the drawings for Balzac's Contes drôlatiques (1885) or the others that illustrate the adventures of Rabelais, D. also gives himself over to a vein of irony of his own that reaches the point of satire; the same may be said of the illustrations for Don Quixote (1865). Nevertheless the most famous works of D.'s immense output are the illustrations of the Divine Comedy (1861) and those of the Bible, which he published in 1864. He was already a famous artist when around 1870 D. devoted himself almost completely to painting first and then also to sculpture, without however attaining in those fields the successes he had obtained in that of illustration. Among his pictorial works mention is made of the Neophyte and Christ Leaving the Praetorium (London, in the G. D. Gallery), and among his sculptural ones the monument to Dumas père (1882), erected in Paris in 1884.

Emilio Lavagnino