M. Doré, senior, who had risen to be chief engineer of the Department of Ain, had to take to Paris his eldest son, who was preparing for the Polytechnic School. Gustave was allowed to accompany them, and this was the happiest moment of the boy’s life. He had won already at the College of Bourg Bourg sufficient artistic success to excite his ambition, and he went at once to Philippon, the editor of the “Journal pour rire.” The sketches he showed at once arrested the attention of Philippon, who was induced to employ him, in spite of his extreme youth; and overcame the reluctance of his father to let him leave the college so soon by signing an agreement which assured him 5000 francs a year for the supply of illustrations, and yet allowed him time to continue his general studies at the Collége Charlemagne. His own accurate observation of nature seems to have sufficed for his artistic education; at least, it may be inferred, from his intense originality, that he was not greatly indebted to any casual master. He has by this time quite attained to the position of a master himself In a notice of him by M. Lemercier de Neuville, 1861, it is stated that he had by that time produced more than sixty thousand vignettes.
Gustave Doré’s style as a painter and draughtsman is to be compared to that of Victor Hugo as a poet. Of French artists he is the most German. His works unite in a singular manner the romantic with the grotesque. He is not a caricaturist, and yet caricature enters as an element into his compositions. He is eccentric, but his eccentricities are always in harmony with nature; like the astonishing skies of Turner, which may be seen at any moment, but, as a fact, are seldom seen.
Fault may be found with his details; but there is a wonderful harmony in each of his designs, looked at as a whole. In the battle pieces, in which he delights, the individual figures may have a difficulty in proving how their attitudes are possible; but the movement of the whole gives an idea of such scenes which perhaps could never be imparted by greater purism in the details. No one scene that he draws resembles another. His landscapes are possible, though not probable, true in poetry but not in prose, ideal rather than actual, and yet only a higher expression of possible actuality. His hills are all alps, his groves interminable forests, his caves are abysses, his horizons are infinite, and his rocks are rent mountains. In fairy tales he is absolutely the creator of the scenery that fits them; and he makes it so potentially real, that it is difficult not to believe in the stories that he illustrates.
Doré’s popularity may be traced to his possessing at once the powers of amusing, astonishing, and affecting. He amuses with his illustrations of Rabelais, and “les contes drolatiques de Balzac;” he astonishes with those of “Le Juif Errant” and Dante; he touches the feelings by those of the war in Italy and the Crimea. Before he edited his wonderful illustrations of Dante, a field in which his genius would naturally be peculiarly at home, he had got rid of some of his early deficiencies by a conscientious study of anatomy. In 1861, besides the volume published by Hachette, which appears to be the work that has won him most renown, he exhibited a great picture, the subject of which is taken from the thirty-second canto of the Inferno. There Virgil and Dante have advanced to the ninth circle, where the souls of traitors are half immersed in eternal ice; and the aspect of the accompanying scenery, though simple and naked, almost freezes the beholder. Doré is so prolific that it would be impossible in a short space to give even a bare list of all that he has done. All lovers of art must wish him long life, and health and strength, to complete all his plans. He has just published a series of wonderful folio illustrations of Don Quixote, carefully studied from real Spanish life, which is indeed to-day nearly what it was in the time of Cervantes. He aspires now to illustrate Homer and the Bible. His Homer will doubtless be a great success, especially the Odyssey. With regard to the Bible, one may doubt whether his nature possesses sufficient reverence to suppress that comic element which in this case must be absent. But good taste seldom fails to direct genius of so high an order, so that we must hope for the best. As to the private life of Doré, it may be said, with a certain qualification, that “he is himself the great sublime he draws.” He is a decided original. At one time he astonishes the natives of Rouen by gymnastic feats on the lightning-conductor of the cathedral, at the risk of his neck At another time we find him in Switzerland, giving a feast and dance to all the population of a village, including guides, for the sake of fatiguing the guides; because he has made a bet that on a certain day no guide should be procurable by the love or money of rich Englishmen, to enable them to achieve exploits of mountain-climbing which would rival his own. To sum up Doré’s character as an artist, he is his own man, and no borrower, though his genius may be said to partake of the horror of Holbein, the quaint accuracy of Dürer, the grotesqueness of Hogarth, the romantic ideality of Moritz Retsch, and even, at times, the massive grandeur of Michael Angelo. G. C. Swayne.