European Art and Old Masters

Note

A prodigy – he worked as a caricaturist for Le Journal pour Rire at the age of fifteen – Gustave Doré was one of the most prolific and highly revered illustrators of the second half of the 19^th century. His vast output is said to be some 10,000 illustrations, with works in nearly 100 books in such notable titles as Don Quixote, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Idylls of the King, Fables de la Fontaine, and London: A Pilgrimage. The latter alone (1872) contained 180 engravings, and took the artist four years to execute. Created six years earlier, La Grande Bible contains 241 engravings.

In addition to working as printmaker – he favored wood and steel engravings – Doré was also an accomplished sculptor and painter. It is his skill as a draftsman that is on full display in the present work, wherein a young woman peers into the eyes of her distraught lover, each seated somewhat uncomfortably in an upholstered armchair. With his left hand, he clutches the chair arm as she clutches his shoulder with her left hand. The scene is rendered all the more poignant by the appearance of natural sunlight which streams through the window at right.

The present work is one of 26 illustrations which Doré completed for Poe's The Raven. Specifically, it illustrates the poem's thirteenth stanza, which goes:

"This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!"

This was Doré’s last project, completed weeks before his death on January 23, 1883 and showing his mastery at rendering a dark, romantic atmosphere. His drawings were turned over to Harper & Brothers in New York City, where fourteen master engravers were hired to rush the volume to press, which was published after Doré's passing.