Gustave Doré

Gustave Dore (1832-1883) was the most prolific illustrator of the nineteenth century and probably the most widely seen artist of his age. He ran a workshop of engravers who cut his drawings into wood, and through them he illustrated Dante, the Bible, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Rabelais and Poe, defining how generations of readers pictured those texts. London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1872, turned the same apparatus on the slums of the imperial capital and produced images of Victorian poverty that still shape the popular idea of it. He painted and sculpted as well, and resented that critics would never take those seriously. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his engravings, free to preview and available as originals for printing.