Die Siesta, Erinnerung an Spanien

Gustave Doré was the most famous illustrator in Europe, the man whose engravings gave readers their picture of Dante's hell, Don Quixote and the Bible. He badly wanted to be taken seriously as a painter too. Through the 1860s he travelled across Spain with the writer Baron Davillier, gathering scenes for an illustrated book about the country, and this canvas is a painted souvenir of those journeys, its very title calling it a memory of Spain. A group rests through the heat of the day in the hard southern light he had seen there. He worked it on the scale of a grand exhibition picture, close to three metres tall, far larger than anything he was famous for printing on a page.