Chapter XII: Paul Gustave Dore

_French School_
1833-1883

This artist died in Paris twenty-five years ago, but there is little as yet to be told of his life history. He was educated in Paris at the Lycée Charlemagne, having gone there from Strasburg, where he was born.

He was a painter of fantastic and grotesque subjects, and as far as we know, he began his career when a boy. He made sketches before his eighth year which attracted much attention, and he earned considerable money while still at school. He was at that time engaged to illustrate for journals, at a good round sum, and before he left the Lycée he had made hundreds of drawings, somewhat after the satirical fashion of Hogarth.

His work is very characteristic and once seen is likely to be always recognised.

He first worked for the _Journal Pour Rire_, but then he undertook to illustrate the work of Rabelais, the great satirist, whose text just suited Doré's pencil. After Rabelais he illustrated Balzac, also the "Wandering Jew," "Don Quixote," and Dante's "Divine Comedy."

He undertook to do things which he could not do well, simply for the money there was in the commissions. He had but a poor idea of colour and his work was coarse, but it had such marked peculiarities that it became famous. He did a little sculpture as well, and even that showed his eccentricities of thought.

PLATE--MOSES BREAKING THE TABLETS OF THE LAW

This is one of the illustrations of the Doré Bible, published in 1865-66. The story is well known of how Moses went up into the Mount of the Lord to receive the laws for the Israelites, which were written upon tables of stone. Upon his descent from the Mount he found that his followers had set up a golden calf, which they were worshipping; and in his wrath Moses broke the tablets on which the Law was inscribed. The power shown in his attitude, the affrighted faces of the cowering Jews, the thunder and lightning as an expression of the wrath of the Almighty are all painted in Doré's best manner.