Doré, Gustave
Doré, Gustave (1832–83),French illustrator, painter, and sculptor, whose fame grew world‐wide with the publication of his engravings in Dante's Inferno (1861). Doré was a skilled draughtsman (drawing directly onto woodblocks), theatrical, poetic, versatile, and incredibly prolific. He was often criticized for his fecundity and for the rapidity of his work, having produced more than 8,000 wood engravings, 1,000 lithographs, 400 oil paintings, and 30 works of sculpture. Anecdotes told frequently about Doré relate how he began to draw when about 4, that he always had a pencil in hand, and that he preferred his pencils sharpened at both ends. With little formal training, Doré began as a young comic‐strip artist, a boy genius, at the age of 15 illustrating a parody of Greek mythology, Les Travaux d'Hercule (Labours of Hercules, 1847), and evolved into a literary artist illustrating the works of Rabelais, Balzac,...
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