Doré, Louis Auguste Gustave

Doré, Louis Auguste Gustave (1832-1883), French artist, the son of a civil engineer, was born at Strassburg on the 6th of January 1832. In 1848 he came to Paris and secured a three years’ engagement on the Journal pour rire. His facility as a draughtsman was extraordinary, and among the books he illustrated in rapid succession were Balzac’s Contes drolatiques (1855), Dante’s Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1863), The Bible (1866), Paradise Lost (1866), and the works of Rabelais (1873). He painted also many large and ambitious compositions of a religious or historical character, and made some success as a sculptor, his statue of Alexandre Dumas in Paris being perhaps his best-known work in this line. He died on the 25th of January 1883.