ギュスターヴ・ドレ

Gustave Doré is best known as the most prolific book illustrator of the 19th century, a reputation he built starting at age 15 as a caricaturist for a Paris comic weekly and never really left. By his thirties he had produced wood-engraved illustrations for Rabelais, Balzac, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and an 1866 illustrated Bible that sold across Europe and America and made his name synonymous with grand, shadowy, crowd-filled scenes.

His most personal project was Dante's Divine Comedy. Doré had wanted to illustrate it since 1855 but could not find a publisher willing to pay for the engravings, so in 1861 he paid for the first printing of the Inferno volume himself. It sold out immediately. The publisher who had turned him down came back asking for the rest, and Doré completed Purgatorio and Paradiso by 1868.

He was also a serious painter, exhibiting large religious and landscape canvases at the Paris Salon throughout his career, though critics and buyers never took that side of his work as seriously as his engravings. Today his reputation rests almost entirely on the more than 10,000 illustrations he produced. He never married, lived with his mother in Paris, and died there of a heart attack in January 1883.