The Doré Bible Illustrations

Gustave Doré

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486131931
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte religiosa

Nowhere but in the Bible were dramatic textual material and the artistry of Gustave Doré more perfectly matched. The Book of Books seemed to unleash a new power of creation in Doré not apparent in his previous work. In the Creation scenes, the horrifying visions of the Flood, the battle sequences with their monumental crowds, the plates depicting the life of Jesus — many of which have now become the standard iconography — and finally the vision of the New Jerusalem, Doré reached the fullest expressions of his extraordinary talent.
This book collects all 241 plates — long out of print — that Doré executed for the Bible. In these plates, reproduced from outstanding early editions, the artist not only captures the dramatic intensity of the Scriptures, but sustains it longer than any other single artist was able to do. In addition, Doré reimagined all the scenes, so that what he produced was not a mere reworking of what centuries of other artists had already done, but a new and fresh visual interpretation of the Bible.
Each plate is accompanied by the verses from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible that the scene depicts, and an Introduction by Millicent Rose covers Doré's life and art in general. This is a sumptuous book that everyone, from those interested in Scripture to lovers of great art, will be proud to possess.

Introduction to the Dover Edition

The Bible as illustrated by Gustave Doré was first published in the French version in 1865, and within the next few years other editions followed, in all the main European languages and in Hebrew. This work is of prime importance in the history of nineteenth-century art: in a period when illustrated books flourished as never before, the most famous of illustrators was working on the great best-seller. In the mid-1860’s Doré was at the height of his fame and his extraordinary fecundity. As he worked on the two hundred forty-one plates for the Book of Books, he called forth his highest powers.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883), born in Alsace at Strasbourg, son of a civil engineer, began his career in Paris at the age of sixteen, as a contributor to Philipon’s new comic paper, Le Journal pour rire. 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 1850’s 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 1860’s he developed a special style of illustrated book, and the publications of this decade include the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, the Fables of La Fontaine, Don Quixote, Perrault’s Contes, The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, Chateaubriand’s Atala, and The Idylls of the King. The new electrotype process made it possible for the expensive wood blocks for these works, once cut, to be duplicated indefinitely without loss of quality, and they were used for editions all over the world.

Doré’s Bible is of the same period as all these notable books, but stands apart from the main current of his life. La Sainte Bible was commissioned not by Hachette, who sponsored so much of the work of the 1860’s, but by...