Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 30 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
Three men are taken aboard a submarine by a captain who has renounced every nation on earth and will not let them leave. Two years underwater — coral forests, a buried city, the South Pole, a giant squid — and an ending that refuses to explain the man at the centre of it.
Why Gustave Doré
Verne's novels were illustrated from the start. Hetzel published them as the 'Voyages Extraordinaires' with hundreds of wood engravings by Édouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville and Léon Benett — and those engravings are so bound to the books that most readers cannot picture the Nautilus without them.
Doré was in that same Paris, in those same decades, working the same medium with the same engravers' studios, and he was better at it than any of them. He never took a Verne commission. So this is not a translation into a foreign idiom — it is the original idiom, with the period's strongest hand doing the drawing.
What to look for
The squid. It is the most reproduced illustration in all of Verne, and this cycle is in direct competition with a picture everyone already has in their head — which is the most useful test of an atelier there is.
