The Religious Paintings of Gustave Doré You Never See
Most people know Gustave Doré paintings only through his engravings, the dark wood blocks of his Bible, his Dante, his Don Quixote that filled every Catholic household library in the second half of the nineteenth century. Far fewer know that the prodigious illustrator was also a serious painter, and that he produced a small but powerful body of religious canvases now scattered between Strasbourg, Hamilton, Houston, and a few private collections. These oil paintings deserve more attention than they usually receive.
This article gathers the seven major religious paintings he produced alongside his much more famous engraved Bible, together with the only known image of the place of his birth.
The Strasbourg Boy Who Became the Most Famous Illustrator of His Age
Gustave Doré was born on 6 January 1832 in Strasbourg, then a French city of the Bas-Rhin, the son of Pierre Louis Doré, a civil engineer, and Alexandrine Marie Anne Pluchart, a great supporter of her son’s artistic gifts. He showed his talent so early that by the age of fifteen he was already on the staff of the Parisian illustrated paper Le Journal pour rire, drawing political cartoons and lithographs. By the 1860s his engraved illustrations to the great works of European literature had made him one of the most internationally famous artists of the nineteenth century.
His painted work was a separate matter. Doré always considered himself first a painter, and was deeply pained by his critics who saw him only as an illustrator. He produced large religious and historical canvases for the Paris Salon in the 1860s and 1870s, and although the critics of the day mostly received them coolly, several of them have lasted as some of the most ambitious sacred images of the late Second Empire.
Christ Leaving the Praetorium
This is the most ambitious of all Doré’s religious canvases. Painted between 1867 and 1872 and measuring more than five metres high and seven metres wide, the picture shows the moment in John’s Gospel when Pilate has condemned Christ and the saviour descends the steps of the Roman praetorium into the crowd of Jerusalem. Doré uses the theatrical scale of an old master altarpiece to stage the moment with the emotional pressure of a press lithograph.
The canvas was finally purchased by the city of Strasbourg in 1989 and now hangs at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in the painter’s home city. It remains one of the largest single religious paintings of the entire nineteenth century.
Christ on the Cross
Far smaller in scale but no less concentrated, this Crucifixion of around 1875 shows Christ alone on the cross against a darkened landscape with the towers of Jerusalem visible behind him. Doré paints the body with the same anatomical accuracy as his engravings but with a softness and silvery atmospheric distance that engraving could never capture. The composition reads almost like a finished version of one of his great Bible illustrations.
The painting is now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, having entered the museum in the late twentieth century.
Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
A companion in spirit to the great Christ Leaving the Praetorium, this large canvas shows the opposite moment of the Passion narrative, when Christ enters the holy city on Palm Sunday. The composition is built on a massed crowd of figures filling the lower half of the picture, while Christ rides slowly forward on his donkey at the upper centre. The whole scene has the panoramic ambition of one of Doré’s great engraved compositions.
The painting is now in a private collection but appears regularly in monographs of the painter’s religious work.
Christ Rising from the Tomb
A smaller and more concentrated scene of the Resurrection, this picture shows Christ stepping from the open sepulchre while the Roman soldiers fall back in terror. Doré paints the risen body with a soft phosphorescent glow that fills the rocky landscape, and the morning light beyond the tomb is treated with the same atmospheric finesse as his great evening scenes.
The work is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in the Department of Drawings and Prints. For a wider survey, see our article on famous Resurrection paintings.
The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism
One of Doré’s most ambitious symbolic compositions, this painting of around 1868 shows Christianity personified as a figure in white standing on the broken statues of the pagan gods, while the angels descend from heaven to crown her. The Pantheon of Rome stands behind her, and the great religions of the ancient world are shown crumbling in the foreground. It is the kind of grand allegory that few late nineteenth century painters except Doré could attempt with conviction.
The painting is at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada, part of the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Collection of nineteenth century academic painting.
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
Drawing on the same Miltonian source that had given Cabanel his great Fallen Angel twenty years earlier, Doré paints the fall of Lucifer and his rebel host into the abyss. The composition is a swirling vertical cascade of bodies twisted in agony, lit by a celestial light from above and a flickering hellish glow from below. The picture is Doré at his most theatrical.
The work is also at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Mont Sainte-Odile with the Pagan Wall
A landscape rather than a strictly religious composition, this picture shows the great Alsatian pilgrimage mountain of Sainte-Odile, with the medieval monastery on its summit and the mysterious ancient stone wall, the Mur Païen, running along its slopes. Doré, who knew the site intimately from his Strasbourg youth, paints it with the silvery atmospheric perspective of one of his great romantic landscapes.
The painting is at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, where the largest single collection of Doré’s painted work is held.
For more context on Doré’s nineteenth century world, see our articles on Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the two great Salon masters of the French Catholic religious imagination of the Second Empire. The wider tradition of Realist Jesus paintings places Doré at its centre.
Summary Table of Gustave Doré’s Religious Paintings
| Name | Artist | Date | Medium | Museum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Christ Leaving the Praetorium | Gustave Doré | 1867 to 1872 | Oil on canvas | Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art |
| Christ on the Cross | Gustave Doré | c. 1875 | Oil on canvas | Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
| Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem | Gustave Doré | c. 1870 | Oil on canvas | Private collection |
| Christ Rising from the Tomb | Gustave Doré | c. 1860 | Oil on canvas | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism | Gustave Doré | c. 1868 | Oil on canvas | Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario |
| The Fall of the Rebel Angels | Gustave Doré | c. 1866 | Oil on canvas | Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art |
| Mont Sainte-Odile with the Pagan Wall | Gustave Doré | c. 1865 | Oil on canvas | Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art |
Conclusion
Doré was so famous as an engraver in his own lifetime that his painting was condemned to live in the shadow of his prints. Even today his Bible is the most widely reproduced illustrated Bible in the history of Christian publishing, and the wood engravings of Don Quixote, the Inferno, and the Idylls of the King are part of the visual culture of every nineteenth century library. But the paintings deserve a separate hearing. Their ambition, their scale, and their evident faith make them one of the more haunting bodies of Catholic painting of the late Second Empire.
Important Facts About Gustave Doré
- Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was born on 6 January 1832 in Strasbourg, the son of a civil engineer named Pierre Louis Doré and his wife Alexandrine Marie Anne Pluchart, who was the great patron of his early artistic education.
- He was largely self-taught and began his career at the age of fifteen as a press illustrator at the Paris weekly Le Journal pour rire, where he produced his first lithographs in 1847 before going on to illustrate the great works of European literature.
- Doré is the central figure of nineteenth century French illustration and is celebrated for his more than ten thousand wood engravings, in particular his illustrated Bible of 1866, his Inferno of 1861, his Don Quixote of 1863, and his Idylls of the King of 1867.
- His most famous religious painting is Christ Leaving the Praetorium, painted between 1867 and 1872 and now displayed at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, one of the largest single sacred canvases of the entire nineteenth century.
- He died on 23 January 1883 in Paris, having shaped the visual imagination of millions of Catholic readers through his illustrated Bible, and his Strasbourg museum holds the most important single collection of his rare painted work.
Questions and Answers About Gustave Doré Paintings
What is Gustave Doré’s most famous painting?
The single largest and most ambitious is Christ Leaving the Praetorium, finished in 1872 and now at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The Crucifixion at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the great Triumph of Christianity at the Art Gallery of Hamilton are also widely studied. Doré is, however, far more famous worldwide as an engraver than as a painter.
Where can I see Gustave Doré paintings today?
The largest single collection of his paintings is at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in his native Alsace, which holds the great Christ Leaving the Praetorium, the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and the Mont Sainte-Odile. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston holds his small Crucifixion, the Metropolitan Museum in New York the Christ Rising from the Tomb, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton the Triumph of Christianity.
What style is Gustave Doré associated with?
Doré is one of the major French Romantic illustrators of the nineteenth century and a late Salon painter of the Second Empire. His painted style combines the dramatic crowd scenes of his engravings with the silvery atmospheric distance of the great French Romantic landscape tradition. Most modern critics place him at the meeting point of Romanticism and the early Symbolist current that flowered later in the century.
Did Doré paint or only engrave?
He did both, and considered painting his first vocation, although he became famous worldwide for his engravings. From the early 1860s until his death in 1883 he produced large religious and historical canvases for the Paris Salon, often on themes drawn from his own engraved illustrations to the Bible and to literature.
How is Doré’s Bible related to his paintings?
The great Doré Bible of 1866 contained 241 wood engravings of biblical scenes and became one of the most reproduced illustrated Bibles in the history of Christian publishing. Several of his oil paintings are essentially finished colour versions of compositions first worked out in those engravings, and his Christ Leaving the Praetorium reuses a composition that had already appeared in his Bible illustrations.
Why was Doré criticised in his own time?
The French critics of the Second Empire considered illustration a lesser art than painting, and Doré’s fame as an engraver hurt him when he submitted large canvases to the Salon. Several of his religious paintings were poorly received in Paris and only found buyers in the United Kingdom and in North America, where his reputation as a sacred imagination was more highly regarded.
Where can I buy Gustave Doré paintings reproductions?
The shop at jesuschrist.pictures offers museum-quality canvas reproductions of the great Christian paintings, and the collection keeps growing; it is the best place to look for Gustave Doré paintings reproductions.
