Doré's Illustrations for "Paradise Lost"

Gustave Doré

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780486134031
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Gustave Doré's Romantic style of illustration, supremely imaginative and richly detailed, was ideally suited to literary subjects. His wood-engraved illustrations for John Milton's monumental epic poem Paradise Lost, recounting mankind's fall from the grace of God through the work of Satan, were among his finest and most dramatic works. This volume presents superb reproductions of all 50 plates drawn by Doré and engraved in his studios for the original edition of Paradise Lost.
Artists and art lovers will find in these pages supreme examples of the illustrator's art. Among the events depicted: the expulsion of Satan from heaven, Adam and Eve in Paradise, the nine-day fall of Lucifer's legions to Hell, the Creation, the temptation of Eve, the Flood, Moses holding up the Ten Commandments, and the fearsome creatures Milton referred to as "Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire."
The dreamlike, otherworldly quality Doré often brought to his work seems especially appropriate for Paradise Lost with its lofty spirit and epic events. Indeed, Doré's grand conception seems to realize perfectly Milton's own poetic version. Appropriate quotes from the text of Paradise Lost are printed alongside each illustration. A plot summary of the entire poem is also included.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

GUSTAVE DORÉ (1832–1883), born in Alsace at Strasbourg, son of a civil engineer, was perhaps the most successful illustrator of the nineteenth century. Doré revealed his artistic bent early in childhood. His father’s desire that he enter a respectable profession was ignored by his mother, who encouraged his development as an artist not only in the early years, but throughout his entire adult life. At the age of fifteen, while on a trip to Paris, Doré sold some work to Charles Philipon’s new comic paper, Le Journal pour rire, and soon after was a regular contributor of lithographic caricatures drawn in the manner of Gavarni and Honoré Daumier. He was immediately popular, and “le gamin de génie,” as Théophile Gautier called him, rapidly became celebrated. His father insisted on his completing his schooling, and there was no opportunity for an academic training in art; he snatched time for unorthodox study in the galleries of the Louvre and the streets of Paris. He was gifted with an extraordinary visual memory and learned by looking.

He soon became, with the death of his father, the chief support of his mother and two brothers, taking on all the work he could get: pictorial journalism, travel books, fiction of varying quality. Though much of his early work was topical caricature, the stinging understanding of his older contemporary Daumier was quite outside his range—he was no politician.

He started work in the year of revolutions, 1848, and it was in the reactionary period that followed, the Second Empire, that he became famous. He found life enjoyable in this society, a society so luxurious at the top and so readily accepting of him. He worked incredibly hard, earned a fortune and spent it lavishly. Doré’s work of the 1850s is more energetic and vivacious than that of anyone else, full of a sense of fun, brilliant and fantastic and sometimes extremely horrid, with a streak of grotesque cruelty. His illustration of the classics began with a delightful Rabelais (1854), and increasingly he cut down on his journalism to specialize in illustrating the world’s great literature. During the 1860s he developed a special style of illustrated book, and the publications of this decade include Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Fables of La Fontaine, Don Quixote, Perrault’s Contes, The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, Chateaubriand’s Atala, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and, in 1866, John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost.

Doré continued to work with astonishing speed, usually drawing his designs directly onto woodblocks. Early in his career he had been upset by the low quality of engraving, and he assembled a shop of about 40 engravers—Gusmand, Pannemaker and Jonnard foremost among them—he thought competent to work on his elaborate, dramatic illustrations. Much of the credit for the success of Doré’s illustrations belong to these skilled artisans. The new electrotype process made it possible for the expensive woodblocks for these works, once cut, to be duplicated indefinitely without loss of quality.

Doré’s books appeared in many editions in many nations; a work such as the Doré Bible was a treasured possession of countless middle-class families. His religious and historical paintings and sculptures, to which he devoted great effort, were less successful. He died in Paris on January 23, 1883, leaving unfinished a memorial to Dumas Père and illustrations for an edition of Shakespeare.

Paradise Lost, the major work of English poet and author John Milton (1608–1674), has been considered a masterpiece of world literature from the moment it was published in 1667. The epic story of man’s fall from grace and subsequent expulsion from Ede...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PUBLISHER’S NOTE