Gustave Dorè (1832-83) was the most popular illustrator of all time, both in terms of number of engravings (10,000+) and number of editions (4,000+). In the forty year period from 1860-1900 a new Dorè illustrated edition was published every eight days! His 238 Bible engravings were by far the most popular set of illustrations ever done, with nearly 1,000 editions. Yet Dorè was much more than just an illustrator. He did over 400 oil paintings. Millions of people came to see a gallery of his paintings. He also did several hundred watercolor landscapes and dozens of works of sculpture. He did the monument to Alexandre Dumas that sits in Paris today.

Why then have so many people never heard of Gustave Dorè? They may not be familiar with his name, but his engravings are everywhere, like on the cover of Time Magazine. Dorè is also one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood. His engravings were used in many classic films like King Kong, Great Expectations, and The Ten Commandments, as well as many recent films like Amistat, Seven & What Dreams may Come. Dorè's name may fade in and out of pop culture usage, but his art has had an enduring influence to generations of romantics and realists alike.

Gustave Dorè was born in Strasbourg France in January 1832. He was the ultimate child prodigy. His earliest dated drawings were from the age of five. The stories of his early artistic prowess are legendary. By the age of 12 he was carving his own lithographic stones, making sets of engravings with stories to go with them. The great French illustrator J. J.Grandville met Gustave and predicted great artistic success. But no one could have dreamed just how quickly that success would come.

Dorè exploded onto the Parisian art scene at the age of 15, even though he was short and looked about ten years old. The Dorè family visited Paris for the first time when Gustave was 15 and he fell in love with that capital of artistic sophistication. One day they went by a publishing company, with a set of engravings displayed in the window. Gustave immediately hatched a plan. The next morning he feigned illness and told the family to go on without him. He quickly made several sketches and headed for that publishing company. He walked in the front door, found the office of the publisher Charles Philipon, and barged right in. He plopped his drawings down on Philipon's desk and exclaimed, "This is how that set of illustrations should be done." Philipon was amused at Gustave's antics, but when he looked down at the drawings he almost cried. He called several other people into his office. No one could believe that little boy had actually done the drawings. So they asked him to do some more drawings right there. He did additional drawings in literally seconds. A collective gasp went up from the group. At this point Philipon refused to let Gustave leave his office. They tracked down Gustave's father and brought him to Philipon. They talked him into signing a lucrative contract for Gustave on the spot. Since the Dorès were headed back home, little Gustave moved in with Monsieur Philipon.

By the age of 16, Gustave Dorè was the highest paid illustrator in France, making more per page than Honore Daumier made at the height of his career. The timing of it all was almost supernatural. Philipon was just launching a new humor weekly, Journal pour Rire. Dorè, the "Boy Genius" (as Theophile Gautier dubbed him) was the featured artist. But even prior to that, Philipon published Dorè's first book when he was just 15. It was a satire entitled The Labours of Hercules. The 1847 book is now extremely rare. The book was entirely by Gustave, who wrote the text, did the drawings & engraved them all on stone. Little Gustave became the toast of Paris.

As a teenager, Dorè did over 2,000 satirical caricature engravings. But he longed for more. In 1854, he launched out into the field of literary engravings, with sets for Rabelais and Balzac. During the 1850s he did dozens of literary works, but once again he longed for more. Then he took a step almost as bold as the steps he took in 1847 into Philipon's office. By this time Dorè was with the leading French publisher Hachette. Dorè told Louis Hachette he wanted to do the ultimate art book, a giant literary folio of Dante's Inferno. Up to this time no Dorè book had retailed for more than 15 French Francs. The proposed Inferno volume would sell for 100 Francs. Hachette turned him down, saying no one would pay that much. Dorè said he would pay for the entire edition. Hachette was listed as the publisher but was actually just the printer. But again Hachette cautioned Dorè to only have a hundred copies bound, so as not to waste all that money on binding. Dorè did 76 full-page folio engravings for the elephant folio edition. It came out in early 1861. A couple weeks later, Dorè received a famous telegram from Hachette. "Success! Come quickly! I am an a__!" Far from selling 100 copies, there have now been over 200 editions of that set of engravings. The horror genre as we know it today has two major sources - the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and the engravings of Dorè for Dante's Inferno. The early 1860s solidified Dorè's position as France's foremost illustrator.

Aseries of children's classics folios followed, from Don Quixote to Baron Munchausen to Fairy Tales. But Dorè was still relatively unknown outside of France. All that would change in December of 1865. In a three year period, the English-speaking world saw twenty Dorè folios containing over 2000 engravings. There were fears he would kill himself from overwork. For nearly twenty years Dorè would be literally the most famous artist in the world. It was often said that you could find Dorè folios in every English-speaking home where they could spell the word "art."

But we are getting ahead of our story. In December of 1865, four Dorè folios were published in England. Shortly thereafter they began a serial of the Dorè Bible, so famous it's mentioned on page 46 of Tom Sawyer. British commissions soon followed of Milton and Tennyson. The main British publisher was Cassell, but by the late 1860s Dorè folios were published in dozens of languages.

Dorè greatly benefitted from another coincidence. It was at this time that electrotypes came into widespread use, allowing unlimited reproduction of engravings through the use of molds. Foreign publishers only needed electrotypes of Dorè's engravings from his original French publishers.

Dorè moved into the field of Fine Arts in the late 1860s, but first let us finish up with his folios. After the Franco-Prussian War, Dorè became a much more serious artist. The year 1872 saw his great social commentary folio masterpiece, London, a Pilgrimage, hailed by everyone from Vincent van Gogh to Lord Kenneth Clark.

Dorè continued to produce a steady flow of folios in the 1870s, but they became more diverse, from a travel folio of Spain to a historical folio of The Crusades to literary classics of Rabelais, Ariosto, and The Ancient Mariner.

In 1882, Dorè took on his only U.S. commission ever for Poe's The Raven. Dorè died in early 1883, just as he was finishing the Raven engravings. He had just turned 51.

In the late 1860s, Dorè was restless again. During the course of his entire artistic life, he moved into a new field about every five years. Dorè's greatest disappointment in France was the fine art establishment's refusal to accept him as a painter. Dorè admittedly had difficulties with color shading. Some have conjectured that he was actually color-blind. French artists were afraid he would come to dominate their field as he had illustration. But Dorè found in England the full artistic respect he so sought. For the last 15 years of his life, Dorè was almost more British than French.

In 1867 a gallery was opened in London to display Dorè's paintings. The Dorè Gallery (New Bond Street) was open continuously in London for 25 years and then it toured the U.S. The British proprietors of the The Dorè Gallery commissioned him to do a large religious painting, similar to one of his Bible engravings. That began a series of enormous religious canvasses for which he became world-famous. They became known as the greatest collection of religious paintings in the world. The French would say, "But his paintings are really just enormous illustrations," and the British would reply, "So what?"

Dorè's final vindication as a painter came in 1896 in Chicago, long after his death. That was the westernmost stop of the Dorè Gallery. The common folks in the midwest of the U.S. dearly loved Dorè and proceeded to break every attendance record at the Art Institute of Chicago. Daily attendance exceeded 16,000 and on the final day, over 4,000 people came through the turn styles in the final HOUR !!! In eight months 1.5 million people came to see the Dorè exhibition. To put that in perspective, the previous record for attendance at any U.S. art museum for an entire year had been 600,000.

Dorè has often been called the last of the Romantics. In the 1870s, Dorè took up watercolor landscapes, particularly in the Alps and in Scotland.

Then in the late 1870s, he turned to sculpture. He found the French more receptive to his sculpture (no problems with coloring). But it was again after his death that he was really accepted. Dorè died just as he was finishing his monument to his good friend Alexandre Dumas. No record can be found of a single negative comment by any French art critic concerning the Dumas monument. Many of them had felt that success came too easily to Dorè, that he had not paid his dues. Instead Dorè paid his dues after he was successful and he died a broken man, even though millions of fan around the world adored his art.

Vincent van Gogh referred to Dorè as an "Artist of the People" because Dorè took his art directed to the masses through his literary folios. Now all of Dorè's art is in the public domain and it is reprinted all over the world. Dorè's sets of engravings are etched into the memory of society's collective subconscious. That is his true legacy.