Pyrenean Landscape

Painted in 1875 and held at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, this Pyrenean landscape by Gustave Doré reveals the other side of an artist known primarily as an illustrator of Dante, Cervantes, and the Bible. Doré was a passionate alpinist and mountain painter who made regular trips to the Pyrenees, and his landscape paintings—less well-known than his graphic work—show a romantic grandeur in his engagement with mountain scenery. The Pyrenees, with their dramatic peaks, deep valleys, and atmospheric effects, gave him a landscape register of sublime scale.

Doré brings his illustrator's instinct for dramatic composition to the Pyrenean landscape, organizing mountain forms, cloud shadows, and light breaks into a strongly structured picture. The paint application is broader and more atmospheric than might be expected from an artist known for precise engraving, with the mountain distances rendered in progressively cooler, grayer tones.