Gustav Dore

Gustave Doré is known above all as an illustrator. His engravings for the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Don Quixote and London: A Pilgrimage are dramatic and crowded, with deep shadows and huge, rolling landscapes. He also painted, and his oils share that sense of vast scale and dark atmosphere.

He was born in Strasbourg in 1832 and was producing published drawings in his teens. He made more than ten thousand illustrations in his lifetime. He was hugely popular in Britain, and a Doré Gallery opened on New Bond Street in London to show his work. A trip to Scotland in 1873 inspired a series of highland landscapes, with misty lochs, mountains and castles.

A Souvenir from Scotland and Castle on the Isle of Skye come from that Scottish experience. Look for the brooding skies and the way light breaks through clouds onto water. He died in Paris in 1883.