Dover Fine Art, History of Art series–From Gustave Doré, one of the most popular — and most prolific — illustrators of all time. Doré created 236 powerful drawings during his trip to Spain in the 1870s. His illustrations, which have cast an image of Spain that will last for all time, include a haunting view of Barcelona’s prison of the Inquisition, dynamic portraits of the huddled poor, soaring interiors of cathedrals, and fiery Spanish dancer, among many other themes.
Louis August Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg on January 6, 1832. At the age of fifteen he began his career working as a caricaturist for the French paper Le Journal pour rire. In the 1860s he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and his depictions of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza, have become so famous that they have influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors’ ideas of the physical “look” of the two characters.
Here’s the link to the five-minute video/slide show of Doré’s illustrations for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, with music by Telemann: http://youtu.be/HJ1__xaXluU