A bearded man hands a key to a young woman, finger raised

A bearded man in a plumed hat and fur-trimmed cloak, a chain of office around his neck, holds out a small key to a young woman with elaborately curled hair, his other hand raised in warning with a finger pointed upward. A bunch of additional keys hangs from his other hand. A heavy curtain fills the background behind them. The engraving illustrates Charles Perrault's La Barbe bleue, as Bluebeard delivers the keys and his warning.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was a French illustrator, painter and sculptor from Strasbourg, and the most prolific and widely reproduced book illustrator of the nineteenth century. Largely self-taught, he was publishing caricatures in Paris at fifteen, and from the late 1850s his wood-engraved plates for Dante's Inferno (1861), Perrault's fairy tales (1862), Cervantes, Milton, the Bible (1866) and Poe's The Raven (1884) fixed the look of those books for generations of readers. Engraved by a workshop led by Héliodore Pisan and Adolphe Pannemaker, his designs combine minute detail with theatrical light, vast landscapes and crowds of figures. From the 1860s he also painted large canvases and Alpine, Scottish and Spanish landscapes, exhibited at the Doré Gallery in London, and turned to sculpture in his last decade. His work is held by the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.