Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was a French printmaker, illustrator, painter, comics artist, caricaturist, and sculptor. He is best known for his prolific output of wood-engravings illustrating classic literature, especially those for the Vulgate Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy. These achieved great international success, and he became renowned for printmaking, although his role was normally as the designer only; at the height of his career some 40 block-cutters were employed to cut his drawings onto the wooden printing blocks, usually also signing the image.
Photograph by Nadar, between 1856 and 8
Doré by Carolus-Duran (1877)
d'Artagnan on Doré's monument to Alexandre Dumas, père in Paris
Doré in 1867 by Nadar
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Leather-covered sandbag, wood blocks and tools (burins), used in wood engraving
The Tench, A History of British Fishes (1835), by William Yarrell
Garb and weapons of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois, August 1875, photo made into a wood engraving.
This is a large wood engraving on an 1883 cover of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Such images were composed of multiple component blocks, combined to form a single image, so as to divide the work among a number of engravers.