Gustave Doré’s Magnificent Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th cen­tu­ry, Gus­tave Doré made his name illus­trat­ing works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Mil­ton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he cre­at­ed one of the most mem­o­rable and pop­u­lar illus­trat­ed edi­tions of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time com­plet­ing a set of engrav­ings for an 1866 Eng­lish Bible. He prob­a­bly could have stopped there and assured his place in pos­ter­i­ty, but he would go on to illus­trate an 1872 guide to Lon­don, a new edi­tion of Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and sev­er­al more huge­ly pop­u­lar works.

In 1884, Doré pro­duced 26 steel engrav­ings for an illus­trat­ed edi­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy clas­sic “The Raven.” Like all of his illus­tra­tions, the images are rich with detail, yet in con­trast to his ear­li­er work, par­tic­u­lar­ly the fine lines of his Quixote, these engrav­ings are soft­er, char­ac­ter­ized by a deep chiaroscuro appro­pri­ate to the mood of the poem.

Above see the plate depict­ing the first lines of the poem, the haunt­ed speak­er, “weak and weary,” slumped over one of his many “quaint and curi­ous volume[s] of for­got­ten lore.”

Below, see the raven tap­ping, “loud­er than before,” at the win­dow lat­tice.

By the time Doré’s edi­tion saw pub­li­ca­tion, Poe’s most famous work had already achieved recog­ni­tion as one of the great­est Amer­i­can poems. Its author, how­ev­er, had died over thir­ty years pre­vi­ous in near-pover­ty. A cat­a­log descrip­tion from a Penn State Library hold­ing of one of Doré’s “Raven” edi­tions com­pares the two artists:

The careers of these two men are fraught with both pop­u­lar suc­cess and unmit­i­gat­ed dis­ap­point­ment. Doré enjoyed phe­nom­e­nal mon­e­tary suc­cess as an illus­tra­tor in his life-time, how­ev­er his true desire, to be acknowl­edged as a fine artist, was nev­er real­ized. The crit­ics of his day derid­ed his abil­i­ties as an artist even as his pop­u­lar­i­ty soared.

One might say that Poe suf­fered the oppo­site fate—recognized as a great artist in his life­time, he nev­er achieved finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty. We learn from the Penn State Rare Col­lec­tions library that Doré received the rough equiv­a­lent of $140,000 for his illus­trat­ed edi­tion of “The Raven.” Poe, on the oth­er hand, was paid approx­i­mate­ly nine dol­lars for his most famous poem.

Project Guten­berg has dig­i­tal edi­tions of the com­plete Doré edi­tion of “The Raven,” as does the Library of Con­gress.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Clas­sic Read­ings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vin­cent Price, James Earl Jones, Christo­pher Walken, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee & More

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Super­nat­ur­al Poem to 3D Paper Life

The Simp­sons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teach­ers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Lit­er­a­ture

Clas­sic Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries by Gus­tave Doré, Édouard Manet, Har­ry Clarke, Aubrey Beard­s­ley & Arthur Rack­ham

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness