SELECTIONS FROM

LES CONTES DROLATIQUES


HISTOIRE DE LA SAINTE RUSSES


ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN


BOTTOM RIGHT - From Gustave Dore, Two Hundred Sketches Humorous and Grotesque , Warne, London, undated c1885.

 

This screen stresses images by Dore you may not have seen - beyond the old warhorses of the Bible and Milton.

One of the most sustained exercises in Gustave Dore's life's work is his set of illustrations to Balzac's Contes Drolatiques Colligez ez Abbayes de Touraine , a grisly evocation of the medieval world from the perspective of 1840 (Paris, Bureaux de la Societe Generale de Librairie).

This sequence of dark moody images of lumpish figures battling to illuminate small sections of immense darkness ends with a marvellously dour piece of cross hatching to describe absolute nothingness in a dark room.

HISTOIRE de la SAINTE RUSSE
 
A highly innovative work with regulalr challenges to the reader as to what a book was - a hand made stain to indicate the shedding of blood, the entirely black illustration (Malevich's Black Square? precursor) , entirely blank panels. Each page measures 18 x 28 cms.
 
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
These examples are characteristic of the Munchausen illustrations. There is a marked contrast throughout the book between 'open illustrations' - that is light and sketchy drawings - and the 'closed illustrations' - the larger pages already demonstrating the even and monotonous hatching and lack of specific incident that was to deaden his hand in The Bible and Dante.

Occasionally Dore manages an image that is innovatory, with something of his old panache and excellence of drawing.


A significant feature of Munchausen is the use of more than the usual number of Night plates, with attendant travellers, striking a melancholy and ominous note in the book.

 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1875, four plates

The Labours of Hercules Paris 1847 titlepage