"Christian Martyrs". COMMENTED: "This picture, a copy of a celebrated painting by the famous French artist, Paul Gustave Dore, born: Strasbourg, France; January 1832, died: February 1883. "No subject in all the wide range of history is so fraught with importance, so clothed and wrapped about with awful interest to the human race, as the struggles, the sufferings, the persecutions of the early Christians. Who can look on such a scene unmoved? Who with soul so dead, with intelligence so dwarfed, that he can see in this picture nothing more than a mere triumph of brute strength over human weakness? To the mind that fully grasps the stupendous fact of immortality, this engraving contains more food for solemn thought than half a hundred other scenes. He who reads this picture will catch for the first time the full meaning of Paul's words when he said, 'I have fought with beasts at Ephesus.' This picture does not illustrate a single episode in history, but represents a scene that was not uncommon in the amphitheater at Rome, during the reign of Diocletian, beginning A.D. 284, when gray-haired sires, feeble mothers, strong men and prattling babes, were cast among the beast, that Christianity might receive a crucial test, such as no other form of religion ever was called upon to endure. Thus the sacrifice that brought immortality to the martyr, gave immortality to the truths for which he died."

The above excerpt printed verbatim from the 1892 edition of "Scenes from Every Land".

Thought of as probably the most popular and French book illustrator during the mid-19th century, Gaustave Dore was very well known for his illustrations of books such as Dante's Inferno, 1861, Don Quixote, 1862, and the Bible, 1866. He was prolific and at one period, utilized more than forty blockcutters for completion of his projects. In the period of 1869-71, he did studies of the slums of London, and through those works caught the attention of van Gogh. He also took up painting and sculpture in the 1870s. The monument of Alexandre Dumas in the Place Malesherbes,Paris, is one of his projects done in 1883.

GUSTAVE DORÉ (1832-1883) was born in Strasbourg but moved to Paris in 1847, where he started on his career as an illustrator with the Journal pour rire. In 1851 he began illustrating for books, and in 1855 he was commissioned by The Illustrated London News to depict Queen Victoria's visit to the Paris Exposition. He became one of the most famous illustrators of the nineteenth century, creating atmospheric and detailed illustrations for the Bible, Divina Comedia by Dante, Milton's Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Perrault's fairy tales. Almost all of his drawings for publications in England, which were compared to the works of William Blake, were drawn or photographed on wood blocks and engraved by Parisian engravers, whose dark shadings have misrepresented him ever since. Although many of his full-page illustrations overpower the text they are meant to elucidate, his graphic depictions of London's poor and destitute for Blanchard Jerrold's London: A Pilgrimage have become part of social commentary.

Unless otherwise noted, all digital photographic reproductions here are ©Mickey Cox 2001/The Right Image Photography and are obtained from photographs taken prior to the year of of publication of 1892. Research is pending and will be posted on the subject artist. Please check back as posted research will be ongoing for each posting.