The Crusades - Doré

Paul Gustave Dore Louis Christophe Was a French artist, printmaker , illustrator , comics artist , caricaturist , and sculptor Who worked primarily with wood-engraving.

Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832. By age 5 he was a prodigy artist, creating drawings that were mature beyond his years. Seven years later, he began carving in stone. At the age of 15, Doré began his career working as a caricaturist for the French paper Le journal pour rire . Wood-engraving was his primary method at this time. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he made several text comics , like Les Travaux d'Hercule (1847), Trois artistes misunderstood et malcontents (1851), Les Dés-agrments d'un voyage d'aménément (1851) and L ' History of Holy Russia(1854). Doré subsequently went on to win commissions to depict scenes from books by Cervantes , Rabelais , Balzac , Milton , and Dante . He also illustrated "Gargantua et Pantagruel" in 1854.

 Doré never married and, following the death of his father in 1849, he continued to live with his mother , illustrating books until his death in Paris following a short illness. The city's Père Lachaise Cemetery contains his grave. At the time of his death in 1883, he was working on illustrations for an edition of Shakespeare's plays . The government of France made him a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1861.