In Which We Gush About Gustave Doré

Man, is this a rad look, or what?

Before there was cinema, there was illustration. That’s really my only justification for posting on 19th century French artist Gustave Doré (Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré, 1832-1883): I could gaze at his woodcuts for hours, and I would recommend that any aspiring film-maker do the same. It’s narrative art, expressed visually. Believe it or not, I just guessed that Doré was an influence on Cecil B. DeMille — I just looked it up and he was!

Satan, from Paradise Lost

I first discovered him in inexpensive paperback Dover editions, when I worked in a bookstore. I not only love his visual sensibility, but I’ll cop to the fact that the works he illustrated speak to my taste, which some will consider unbearably basic. The canonical classics of the 19th century and earlier, running toward the fantastical, nightmarish and purely imaginative. H.P. Lovecraft was a fan! Notable works illustrated by Doré include The Bible,Milton’sParadise Lost, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other plays, Perrault’s Fairy Tales, Cervantes’Don Quixote, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Poe’sThe Raven, Tennyson’sIdylls of the King, and works of Byron. He also collaborated with journalist Douglas William Jerrold, on London: A Pilgrimage, a book length exploration of the city as he saw it in the early 1870s.

Doré was also a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His statues include a monument to Dumas that is located in Paris. Yeah, that’s my poison, and I don’t care who knows it. It’s definitely more about the eye, the heart, the gut, and the groin than it is about the brain, and to my mind in the realm of art that is fully legitimate.