Doré's London

All 180 Illustrations from London, A Pilgrimage

Gustave Doré

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486135649
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

London in the middle of the 1800s was a subject sketched endlessly by artists, studied by social reformers, and discussed by writers. This comprehensive collection of drawings by Gustave Doré, France's most celebrated graphic artist of the period, presents all 180 drawings from the artist's 1872 classic presentation, London, A Pilgrimage.
A panoramic portrait of that engrossing city, the collection ranges from images of fashionable ladies riding in a sunlit park to ragged wretches in a shadowy side street. Here are remarkably perceptive sketches of workaday London, busy marketplaces, the Christy Minstrels, a waterman's family, thieves gambling, the Devils' Acre in Westminster, flower girls, waifs and strays, a wedding at the Abbey, provincials in search of lodgings, a garden party, prisoners in the Newgate exercise yard (a scene that so greatly impressed Vincent van Gogh that he copied it in a painting), stalls at Covent Garden Opera House, and many other scenes that capture London of bygone era.
Taken from a volume that is widely regarded as the illustrator's greatest single work, the drawings in this collection will delight Doré admirers and anyone fascinated by the many aspects of Victorian London.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

BY THE TIME of his first visit to London in 1868, the French artist Gustave Doré (1832–1883) had secured a worldwide reputation. Brilliantly observant and brilliantly imaginative, he had taught himself to draw as a child; by the age of fifteen he was contributing lithographic caricatures to the Journal pour rire, and after the death of his father he supported his brothers and mother as an illustrator and journalist. His first real fame came from his illustrations of Rabelais, which were first published in 1854.

During that first visit to London he was shown around by his English friend Blanchard Jerrold (1826–1884), the French correspondent for the London Daily News, whom he had first met thirteen years earlier when both men had traveled to Boulogne to cover Queen Victoria’s visit to France. Doré was fascinated by London, and he and Jerrold began to discuss the possibility of doing a book on the city. During Doré’s second visit, in the spring of 1869, they began the studies for the book. London: A Pilgrimage was published in 1872—appearing first in monthly parts and later as a bound volume.

Jerrold’s original plan had been for a panorama that would include all classes of Londoners, but he and Doré lacked the time and resources for such a vast undertaking. Although they certainly did not ignore the fashionable world, they had to cut back somewhat on their projected ...