Gustave Doré born in France in 1832. Died in 1883.
Doré is dismissed as "an illustrator" but he did more to bring visual arts to the masses than any other ten "fine art" painters, mainly because he was commissioned to provide illustrations to the Douay-Rheims Bible and to classics like Don Quixote and Dante's Inferno.
In a sense, he was to the 1850-1880s what Walt Disney and Looney-Toons were to the 1930s-to-1970s. He made fine art, the classics and culture accessible to the masses.
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Michael the Archangel smiting Rebel Angels
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Satan vanquished
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Dore's illustrations entered the culture and are the norm or baseline for what we think many arch-type characters "look like".
Thanks as always for sharing, ERJ.
ReplyDeleteNC Wyeth was another one of these sorts of artists: perhaps spoken poorly of by the artistic elite of the day but his illustrations created the image of adventure novels in the early 20th Century like Treasure Island.