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Any fans of Gustave Dore and his Artwork?


I found a cool page on Facebook loaded with the art of Gustave Dore in color here https://www.facebook.com/GustaveDoreArtAndIllustraitions?fref=ts very good art work by a great artist and engraver.

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Gustave Doré's "The New Zealander" makes an evocative image - a man sketching the abandoned ruins of London in the future. Although abandoned city pictures (usually featuring the Statue of Liberty) are something of a science fiction cliché now.

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The curious thing about Dore is that he is mostly known in terms of monochrome engravings as illustrations of the Bible, Dante, Don Quixote, the Ancient Mariner, etc. And these images are so ubiquitous that he can suffer from the overfamiliarity, which is a shame.

Ironically, I'm not convinced he created any of these engravings; they were all signed by other very experienced engravers, and were surely engraved by them from Dore's original models - under his supervision of course. Some of those original designs were themselves more or less monochrome, conceived entirely as models for the engravers, but even in these, the play of warmer and cooler tones was rather interesting. Compare this Dore painted sketch..

http://www.arthermitage.org/Gustave-Dore/Tavern-in-Whitechapel.big.html

... with the engraving (presumably derived from it and, perhaps, others) that appeared in the book "London":

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0e/31/8f/0e318f2dc536ea4ad6a8a03af3fef320.jpg

Some of his paintings, not planned as illustrations, were surprisingly massive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Doré#/media/File:Le_Christ_quittant_le_prétoire-Gustave_Doré_(2).jpg

Not all his work was on the epic scale:

http://usercontent2.hubimg.com/4416027_f1024.jpg

... which somehow reminds me of his older contemporary, Honore Daumier.

(By the way, I'd just add that in the link you give, the "colorised" engravings are pretty ghastly. Nasty acidic colours that don't approximate Dore's own palette, and actually compromise the engravings. Not at all the best advertisement for M. Dore, I'm afraid.)


Call me Ishmael...

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There was a great exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa last year.



Don't give me songs
Give me something to sing about

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Yes, me.

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