A cluster of boys lost among towering forest trees

Tall trees crowd a dense forest, their canopies dappled with light against a darker understorey. In a small clearing, a knot of boys in caps and short tunics stands close together, heads tilted upward as if searching the branches, while one boy sits apart on a rock at the left with his knees drawn up. Ferns and low brush cover the forest floor; a broken, hollow tree stump rises behind the group.

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.