Scottish Highlands

Gustave Doré is remembered primarily as the most celebrated illustrator of the nineteenth century, his engraved images for Dante, Milton, Cervantes and the Bible achieving a worldwide circulation that no painter of his era could match. Yet Doré harboured genuine ambitions as a landscape painter, and his Scottish and English views, made during visits to Britain in the 1870s, represent his most sustained engagement with the painted canvas. He was received warmly in London, where the Doré Gallery in Bond Street exhibited his large-scale paintings from 1869 onward, and British patrons proved more receptive to his work in oil than the Paris Salon had been. The Scottish Highlands pictures belong to a Romantic tradition rooted in the sublime landscapes of Turner, Constable and the German painter Caspar David Friedrich: a tradition that reads weather and light as moral forces, and measures humanity by its smallness within wild nature. Doré's Scottish scenes carry the same theatrical chiaroscuro he deployed so masterfully in his engravings, translated here into the warmer, more fugitive medium of oil paint.