GUSTAVE DORÉ (STRASBOURG 1832-1883 PARIS) - photo 1
GUSTAVE DORÉ (STRASBOURG 1832-1883 PARIS) - photo 2

GUSTAVE DORÉ (STRASBOURG 1832-1883 PARIS)

Lot 92
22.03.2023 15:00UTC +01:00
Classic
Sold
€ 94 500
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationFrance, Paris
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Archive
ID 922165
Lot 92 | GUSTAVE DORÉ (STRASBOURG 1832-1883 PARIS)
Estimate value
€ 50 000 – 80 000
GUSTAVE DORÉ (STRASBOURG 1832-1883 PARIS)

Le Corbeau et la Mort

signé ‘G Doré’ (en bas à droite)

52,2 x 35,5 cm (20 1/2 x 14 in.)

graphite, pinceau, lavis brun, rehaussé de blanc, filigrane ‘WHATMAN/ 1879’





Provenance

Collection particulière, États-Unis.

Galerie Didier Aaron, Paris, 2012, d’où acquis par le propriétaire actuel.



Post lot text

GUSTAVE DORÉ, THE RAVEN AND THE DEATH, GRAPHITE, BRUSH, GREY WASH, HEIGHTENED WITH WHITE, SIGNED

This large sheet is preparatory for one of the twenty-four wood engravings illustrating a 1883 edition of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). The publication was agreed by December 1882, and Doré’s drawings were delivered only a month later, but the artist, who died by January 1883, never saw the project completed (Gustave Doré. L’imaginaire au pouvoir, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée d’Orsay, and Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2014, pp. 93-94).
Poe first published this narrative poem in 1845; it became one of the author’s most famous works. On a dark and cold winter night, as the narrator tries to read and distract himself from the death of his beloved Lenore, he doses off. Soon he is visited in his dream by a majestic crow, driving the sad lover from a frenetic to a mad state, through the states of regret and mourning. The poem was translated as Le Corbeau a few years after the poem came out by Charles Baudelaire in 1853, then by Stéphane Mallarmé in 1872. It is, however, on the original text that Doré based his illustrations for the 1883-1884 edition which was simultaneously published in London by Sampson & Low ,and in New York at Harper & Brothers. In her biography of the artist from 1887, Blanche Roosevelt gives an emphatic description of Doré’s illustrations: ‘The poet’s luxurious feeling of melancholy resonated with the saddened imagination of Doré, who poignantly rendered the indescribable sadness of this dark idyll’ (La Vie et les œuvres de Gustave Doré, d’après les souvenirs de sa famille, de ses amis et de l’auteur, Paris, 1887, p. 376).
Three further preparatory drawings for The Raven are known, of similar technique and dimensions: Ananké at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (fig. 1; inv. 55.992.13.31; see exhib. cat., op. cit., 2014, no. 76, ill.); ‘For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore –/ nameless here for evermore’ in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (fig. 2; inv. 14935; see ibid., no. 228, ill.); and ‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door‘ in a private collection (ibid., no. 233, ill.).
This project greatly contributed to the fame of Gustave Doré in America, and since its first publication the book received praise from literary critics: ‘Plainly there was something in common between the working moods of Poe and Doré […]. Both resorted often to the elf-land of fantasy and romance. In melodramatic feats they both, through their command of the supernatural, avoided the danger-line between the ideal and the absurd. […]. Poet or artist, Death at last transfigures all.’ (E. C. Stedman, ‘Comment on the Poem’, in Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, illustrated by Gustave Doré, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1884, p. 14; see exhib. cat., op. cit., 2014, p. 94).

Fig. 1. Gustave Doré, Ananké, graphite, gray wash, Strasbourg, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Fig. 2. Gustave Doré, Lenore, graphite, gray wash, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada.
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