Gustave Dore

The plates are the reason to open it, and the text was already three thousand years old. Gustave Doré cut 241 wood engravings for a two-volume French Bible published in 1866, and they have been reprinted on their own ever since, which is what the collection amounts to: the pictures without the book they were made for. Doré lived from 1832 to 1883, was born in Strasbourg, sold his first lithographs at fifteen, and worked at a speed that let him illustrate Rabelais, Balzac, Dante, Don Quixote, Milton and Poe's The Raven alongside the Bible. He drew and a workshop of engravers cut the blocks. London: A Pilgrimage, made with the journalist Blanchard Jerrold in 1872, turned the same eye on slums and docks and was attacked in England for doing so. He was the illustrator, not the author of the text.