A woman leans over a man reclining by lamplight

A man sits back in an armchair with his eyes closed, head tilted, while a woman with flowing hair and a wreath leans over him from behind, one arm resting across his shoulder. Sunlight falls in a diagonal beam across the room, past an oil lamp on a side table and a framed picture on the wall; a folding screen stands in the shadows behind. The engraving illustrates Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, in Gustave Doré's 1884 edition, accompanying the line on the chair's velvet lining.

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.