Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/147

 GUST AVE DORE 999 architecture and of mountain scenery which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil in his hand, which he begged to have " sharpened at both ends," that he might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes, and of an athletic temperament. Theophile Gautier afterward called him a "gamin de genie.' In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillip- pon looked at them, and sent a letter to Dore's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of work, and was a cele- brated man before he was twenty. No one knows how many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late, and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books. One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks ex- cessive, credits him with having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty ! Mr. Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one year. His " Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his " Holy Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's " Contes Drdlatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments of their art. We all know the books that followed. Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at great can- vases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would not accept them, were hugely admired in the Dore" Gallery of London. Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out with excessive production — a great name, but an un- satisfied man. Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with Dore' the illustrator, and then with Dore the painter and sculptor. It is an eminently nat- ural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at Dora's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it. Dora's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and caricature was his inevi- table field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier work, up to and including