Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré was particularly fascinated with English literature. Since moving to London in 1866 to open a gallery of his works, the artist rediscovered British Romantic authors and other works of the literary canon via newly edited, republished editions.  Throughout the following decade, Doré became a leading illustrator for these editions, and among his chief projects were Milton's Paradise Lost, Tennyson's Idylls of the King and the works of Lord Byron and Charles Dickens.  Above all, as Doré remarked, the "intention is to make Shakespeare my masterpiece” (La vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Doré, Paris, 1983, p. 188, translated from the French).  Yet the project never reached its full completion.  While engravings were made after his work for Macbeth, in 1870, his public still waited a "Doré Shakespeare," which "has been talked about for some years, and we can all understand what pictures of Prospero's island, and of the moonlight groves of Oberon and Titania, such a book would contain, however much the artist's imagination might contradict our English sense of what would be appropriate" (A Doré Gallery, 1870; reprinted, New York, 1974, p. 41). 

Because of the lack of a full illustrative program for each of the Bard's plays, works such as the present pair of watercolors are a fascinating glimpse into what might have been.  Previously, the artist had visited the theme of a Midsummer Night's Dream in oil  (see Sotheby's, London, November 11, 1995, lot 47), with a composition of diaphanously draped fairies gathering in a dense forest under a brilliant moon, while smaller butterfly-winged imps scamper about whispering into each other's ears.  Turning to watercolor for this pair, Doré heightens the ethereal mood, with gauzy washes of pale color depicting the miniature fairy court that floats and flutters about Titania as she rests on her bower of woodbine. Swirling in circles the fairy ring's formation is cleverly echoed by the circular shape of the watercolors themselves.  The pendant work, set deeper in the wood, consists of more heavily applied tones of violets, blues and yellows, creating a drowsy, dreamy effect to the scene, in which a central fairy blows a pair of trumpets made of flowers.  Together, these works seem to illustrate the moment in the play's Scene II Act II where "There sleeps Titania sometime of the night/ Lull'd in the flowers with dances and delight."

 While the present works may not have been intended directly for engraving, they correspond to the intricate, multi-layered quality of similarly themed illustrations Doré executed for fairy tales and other "mystical" writings.  Moreover, these works begin to realize the extraordinary aesthetic possibilities afforded by Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps Shakespeare's most visually evocative work.  Critics pointed out that  the play offered "a profound view of the inward life of nature and her mysterious springs, which… can never be altogether unknown to the genuine poet," where fairies, "those elegant pieces of arabesque, little genii with butterfly wings rise, half embodied, above the flower-cups" (August Wilhelm von Sclegel, Lectures on Dramatic Poetry, translated by John Black, London 1846, p. 396, 393 as quoted in Victorian Fairy Painting, London, 1998, pp. 39, 41).