Gustave DORÉ (1832-1883) - Lot 20

Gustave DORÉ (1832-1883) "Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf", circa 1860 Oil on canvas, signed lower left G.Doré 60 x 100 cm (view) (craquelure, slight dent in the headdress) Provenance: - French and Company, Inc, New-York, USA. - Collection Mr Jean-Marie Rossi, France. When Gustave Doré illustrated Les Contes de Perrault (1862), he did more than simply accompany the text: he gave it a new, typically Romantic moral and psychological dimension. His Little Red Riding Hood is not a naïve children's scene, but a meditation on innocence, fear and evil. Doré stages the contrast between : The child, frail, bright and naive, symbolizing purity and trust. The forest, vast, dark and oppressive, symbolizing the world, mystery and menace. The wolf, the embodiment of evil, desire, cunning and even human bestiality. This visual tension illustrates the loss of innocence: entry into the forest becomes a metaphor for the passage to adulthood, contact with the temptation and cruelty of the world. In the 19th century, Little Red Riding Hood continued to serve as a moral warning. "Beware of strangers, of seduction, of the danger beneath sweet appearances". Gustave Doré reinforces this dimension: the wolf is not just an animaL. he symbolizes the social or sexual predator. The little girl becomes a victim of naivety and trust. His images thus carry a strong moral and emotional message, in tune with the moral and bourgeois concerns of his time. For the artist, Little Red Riding Hood is also a reflection on the human condition. Gustave Doré, often fascinated by mystery and death, returns here to his favorite themes: fear, innocence and the tragedy of the world. In the 20th century, surrealist women artists were also inspired by Perrault's tale, as a metaphor for feminine desire and transgression. Painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning sometimes took up the theme of the little girl and the wolf in dreamlike, sensual and disquieting visions. Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo also evoke this type of symbolism: threatened childhood, animality, metamorphosis. Cindy Sherman, the famous photographer and feminist, depicts herself in fairy-tale roles, including Little Red Riding Hood. In her "Fairy Tales" series (1985-1990), she hijacked the myth to denounce feminine stereotypes, fear and the violence hidden in children's stories. This composition is iconic in the work of Gustave Doré, whose famous engraving is taken from a set created for Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales. First published in Charles Perrault's "Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités" in 1698, the tale is said to be based on a series of wolf attacks that took place in the Bois du Déluge, Marcoussis, between November 1692 and March 1693. In 1862, Pierre-Jules Hetzel asked Gustave Doré to create illustrations for a new edition of Charles Perrault's Tales, in folio format, with full-page engravings highlighting the major elements of each tale. Somewhere between Gothic and Romanticism, Gustave Doré returned to his preferred registers, mixing rural, nocturnal and romantic scenes. The engravings were produced by various engravers, including Pannemaker for our subject. Of the 40 engravings produced for this book, three are dedicated to Little Red Riding Hood: She meets the wolf; With her big teeth, he had eaten a good grandmother; Red Riding Hood was astonished to see how her grandmother was made. The third engraving takes up the subject of our painting. These illustrations are Doré's most famous works, and immediately received enthusiastic reviews, including one from Sainte-Beuve in Les Nouveaux Lundis (December 23, 1861): "A Perrault like none I've seen before, and like none I'll see again. (...) I can only say that these drawings seem to me very beautiful, with a rich and opulent turn, that they have a grandiose character that renews the aspect of these humble tales and gives them back their first marvelousness, predating Perrault himself."