No matches
Some remarks from an article in the Magazine of Art Vol 6:
His work in black and white has some of the shortcomings and defects of his work in colour, it is true; but it stands on a far higher plane of invention, and belongs to a far higher order of craftsmanship.
The imagination is abnormal; but it is genuine and original in kind, and its measure is inexhaustible. The invention is really prodigious; the ease, the daring, the spontaneity are not to be gainsaid; the illuminating quality in its way and within the limits of its capacity is unrivalled. If we are enamoured of what is fantastic and quaint, and of what is visionary and grotesque, we may turn to Doré without fear of disappointment; for in these attributes his talent was rich indeed, and his expression of them is unique in illustrative art.
His most individual work has the gigantic vagueness, the rapidity, the impossible and affecting unreality, of a supernatural dream. He thought in pictures; and his thoughts are those of one to whom the unseen, intangible world is more friendly and more fruitful than the world in which men dwell. They take no heed of flesh and blood, nor the essentials of life, nor the unalterable truths of nature. They deal with an actuality of their own projecting and contriving: with a universe of figments and appearances, with a scheme of things that is no more than a scheme of shadows. They work and move in a region of dimness and illusion, of shifting shapes and processions of strangeness—a region remote from fact and peopled with impossibilities alone.
