GUSTAVE DORÉ PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY
GUSTAVE DORÉ
French, 1832 - 1883
BIOGRAPHY
Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg and the first ten years of his life were spent there, "surrounded by the medieval Gothic and ancien régime architecture typical of the Alsace. These surroundings made a lasting impression on the young Doré, as did the splendid Renaissance spiral staircase in his parents' home in the Rue des Ecrivains (as Hans Haug notes in his preface to the catalogue of the Doré retrospective held in Strasbourg in 1854). Strasbourg and Alsace were fated to figure prominently (albeit in duly transliterated form) in the work of the gifted and precocious Doré, notably in his illustrations for Balzac's Contes Drolatiques (Tall Tales) of 1855, one of Doré's finest achievements. Here, the picturesque architectural decor of Strasbourg's imposing house façades is captured brilliantly. This also holds true of Doré's nostalgic 1875 drawing of Midnight Mass in Alsace, as it does for the other landscapes, castles and architectural features that litter his work.
"In 1843 Doré's father, a civil engineer, was seconded to Bourg-en-Bresse, where he, his wife and three sons settled. Young Gustave, who had been drawing avidly since the age of four, produced several albums of humorous drawings and even a Mythology (of which, sadly, only a few individual drawings remain). Doré moved to Paris in 1847 to complete his studies at the Charlemagne secondary school. By this time he was already a contributor to Charles Philipon's popular Journal pour Rire. By the age of 17 Gustave was already painting in oils, chiefly landscapes of the Vosges and Alps. His father had died in 1849, so Doré was then living with his mother in Paris, although he later made several journeys to the Pyrenees and Alsace, along the Rhine and into the Black Forest, to Spain and to England — notably London where, in 1868, he established the Doré Gallery, which was an immediate success with the London public, not least in commercial terms.
"It was in London that Doré started drawing with a new and acerbic realism, capturing not only scenes from horse races and daily life in the English capital but, above all, the misery and poverty which beset the average citizen in 19th-century London, described so vividly in the social criticism of Flora Tristan, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, not to mention Jack London's People of the Abyss. That said, Doré's career reached an important turning point in 1854 when he started to illustrate Rabelais. Although he somehow found time to frequent London society, play sports and indulge in liaisons with actresses and other ‘ladies' of the day —such as Cora Pearl or Alice Ozy (Chassériau's former model) — Gustave Doré worked (and chain-smoked) incessantly, drawing and painting for 12 or even 16 hours at a stretch, so busy in fact that he didn't have time to engrave his own work and had to farm it out for others (at one count more than 40 woodcut engravers) to 'interpret’.
"At the age of 30, Gustave boasted of his intention to publish 'every literary masterpiece ever written’. Meanwhile, in addition to his activity as an illustrator, he was still painting works for exhibitions at the Paris Salon; he exhibited there from 1848 to 1882. Inevitably his health failed him, and a serious heart condition was diagnosed in 1878 and he died in 1883. Not long before his death, Doré finally conceded that he had attempted too much: 'I worked too hard’, he is reported to have said.
“Doré died before realising his greatest ambition; to illustrate the works of Shakespeare, although preparatory studies for illustrations for Macbeth were drawn in 1877. It is scarcely surprising that he was unable to fulfil his dream, bearing in mind that his body of work has been estimated by Jean Adhémar to comprise over 100,000 drawings, lithographs, engravings and paintings, as well as 40 groups, statues, low reliefs and decorative pieces, according to Henri Leblanc. While it would be invidious to single out individual works, mention should perhaps be made of his extraordinary and hallucinatory tribute to the poet Gérard de Nerval (Rue de la Vieille Lanterne) and, among his sculptures (all executed during the final 12 years of his comparatively short life), his magnificent 1883 Monument to Alexandre Dumas, which stands in the Place Malesherbes in Paris…
"Gustave Dore's immediate influences included Grandville, Töpffer and Gavarni, followed after 1861 by Victor Hugo's drawings. In effect, Doré often comes close to the German Romanticists. Bredin collaborated with Doré, and van Gogh admired his work immensely (painting his own Ronde des prisonniers from one of Doré's London engravings). Redon was also influenced by Doré, particularly by his 'visionary' style. Doré also emerges as a direct precursor of the cold, detached, almost sadistic dream-world of the Surrealists.” [Benezit, Dictionary of Artists, Paris, 2006, vol. 4, pp. 1076-1077]
Museum Collections
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery, Greenville, SC
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Château de Versailles, Versailles
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA
Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Dahesh Museum, New York
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds
Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN
Musée Bargoin, Clermont-Ferrand
Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg
Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand
Musée de l’Ain, Bourg-en-Bresse
Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble
Musée de Pontoise, Pontoise
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Béziers
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Maubeuge
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg
Musée de Toulon, Toulon
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Musée du Petit Palais, Paris
Musée Gustave Courbet, Ornans
Musée Magnin, Dijon
Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of London, London
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Phoenix Museum of Art, Phoenix, AZ
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL
Royal Collection, London
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA
Sheffield Museums, Sheffield
Temple Newsam House, Leeds
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD
