Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

Details

Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

Le Rêve du Moine

signed and dated 'G. Doré/1880'; oil on canvas
96 x 120in. (243.8 x 304.7cm.)

Provenance

Messrs Fairless & Beeforth, The Doré Gallery, London, 1880-1

Literature

The Queen 14th August 1880 "The most recent addition to the Doré Gallery in Bond Street, the work which the artist calls 'A Day Dream', is intended as a companion picture to his well-known 'Neophyte'. The scene presented to us is that of a young monk with finely drawn features and intellectual cast of countenance, seated in the organ loft of his monastery, who, as he lightly touches the notes of the instrument - to the solemn sounds of his brethren in procession, and with lighted tapers, are seen quitting the precincts of the chapel below - is by some re-awakened memory, suggested in the idea of the spirit-like looking form of a bright and beautiful girl. She is faintly discernible in the gleam of light from the window, alive to the possibility that he may have been mistaken in the life of selfish asceticism to which he has doomed himself. This we take to be the meaning of M. Doré's design, as the scene presents a suggestion of a life of penance and self-mortification in the long procession of shaven monks wending their way in the semi-gloom, in opposition to the idea of the measure of ordered happiness permitted by the Almighty to those accepting the ordinance giving woman as an help-mate to man. The latter idea is forcibly expressed in the questioning look of doubt and hesitation in the face of the young monk, and in the purely beautiful female figure appearing to him momentarily as in a vision, conveying the notion of domestic happiness he has voluntarily and perhaps needlessly forefeited."
Francis Roubiliac Conder, Pictures by M. Gustave Doré exhibition catalogue, the Doré Gallery, London, 1882, pp. 42-4, no. 18 as Day Dream

Exhibited

The Doré Gallery, 1881

Lot Essay

There is a preliminary sketch for this picture, see Gustave Doré, 1832-1883 exhibition catalogue Strasbourg, 1983, no. 68.

Doré's fascination with the theme of the novice monk started in 1855 with the lithograph Frère Angel. Then Le Néophyte, which is closely related to the print was exhibited in the German Gallery, London in 1868 but was not completed unitl 1869 (now in the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia).

In Nadine Lehni's entry for the preliminary drawing in the recent Strasbourg exhibition, she suggests that Doré found in this theme a metaphor for his own disillusionment and for the alienation which he experienced amidst the indifferent public reception granted his paintings.

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