Works by Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré made more than 10,000 illustrations, the best known being wood-engravings for the Bible and Dante, though as a rule he only drew the designs and block-cutters did the cutting.

In his 1855 lithograph of The Suicide of Gérard de Nerval a skeleton crouches on an iron bar above the slumped poet while dream figures pour down through the sky. It was never printed in an edition and marks the high point of his work on stone. His Don Quixote illustrations of the 1860s shaped how later readers pictured the knight and Sancho Panza. He painted the pair as well: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria, dated with a query to 1863, is a crowded interior in warm browns.

Under a five-year contract he spent three months a year in London for a book with Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage of 1872, and some British critics complained that it dwelt on the city's poor. Flower Sellers of London, painted about 1875, lines up a barefoot girl, two women holding babies and a flower basket against a stone wall. By one museum's account he honed his watercolour technique on a trip to Scotland in 1873. In Scottish Highlands, an 1875 oil, sun breaks through heavy cloud onto green slopes, white streams thread the mountain, and a tiny figure walks below.

Landscapes are about as common below as scenes from religion and myth, and paintings outnumber the prints. Enigma of 1871 is painted almost entirely in greys: a winged figure clings to a sphinx on a hilltop above heaped bodies, with a city sunk in smoke beyond.

Sources: Wikipedia, Walker Art Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Toledo Museum of Art, Musée d'Orsay.