Gustave Doré

Epsom Derby: Tattenham Corner. Collision on the corner added in 1784 with the extension of the course from a mile to a mile-and-a-half.

Born in Strasbourg in 1832, at the age of fifteen Gustave Dore was signed to a three-year contract with Auber and Philipon, well known publishers of caricatures and comic magazines. Dore’s exceptional drawing talents and his contributions to Philipon’s new periodical Journal pour rire soon made him famous. Gifted with an exceptional memory and a rapid method of working coupled with an ever-present anxiety about money, he was phenomenally productive and by the 1850s largely had the monopoly of illustration in Paris.

At the beginning of his career Dore had worked largely in lithograph, drawing upon the stone himself, but in the years of his greatest fame nearly all of his work was engraved on wood. He drew his designs directly upon the blocks, working on several at once until complete for his army of assistants to cut. By the time of his early death, at fifty-one from a stroke, he had created more than ten thousand illustrations.

 In 1867 Dore mounted a major exhibition in London leading to his paintings being permanently on show in New Bond Street. He entered into a incredibly lucrative four-year contract with publisher’s Grant and Co. producing drawings of London. The drawings were serialised and then published in 1872 as London: A Pilgrimage. It was an unusual collection of images focusing on London’s high and low society equally. The Pilgrimage brought him considerable criticism at the time for the 'vulgar' depictions of abject poverty but also lasting acclaim. Several years after Dore’s death, Vincent Van Gogh copied Dore’s Newgate Prison Exercise Yard for his painting Penitentiary.