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Gustave Doré
(1832-83)
Doré, Gustave
(1832-83).
The most popular and successful French book illustrator of the mid 19th
century. Doré became very widely known for his illustrations to such books
as Dante's
Inferno (1861),
Don Quixote (1862),
and the Bible (1866), and he helped to give European currency to the
illustrated book of large . He was so prolific that at one time
he employed more than forty blockcutters. His work is characterized by
a rather naïve but highly spirited love of the
grotesque
and represents a commercialization of the
Romantic taste for the bizarre.
Drawings of London done in 1869-71 were more sober studies of the poorer
quarters of the city and captured the attention of
van Gogh.
In the 1870s he also took up painting (doing some large and ambitions
religious works) and sculpture (the monument to the dramatist and novelist
Alexandre Dumas in the Place Malesherbes in Paris, erected in 1883, is his
work).
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