L'enigma

Doré was famous for illustrating Dante and the Bible, but in 1871 he painted this out of grief. He had been born in Strasbourg, and France's defeat by Prussia the year before had just cost the country Alsace, his home region. On a hill strewn with the dead stands a sphinx, and behind it Paris burns under a black sky. A winged figure, perhaps France herself, clings to the creature and seems to beg it for a reason why. Doré worked the whole thing in ashen greys and showed it with two other war pictures under the title Souvenirs of 1870. He drew the mood from a line of Victor Hugo about everything men build coming to nothing.