Gustave Doré

Although Doré’s dark-toned art had only minor significance for Degas, Doré’s representations of familiar urban subjects resembled and even anticipated Degas’s own versions. Doré depicted contemporary life with biting realism, and his greatest achievement was his collaboration with the English journalist Blanchard Jerrold on London: A Pilgrimage (1872), to which Tavern in Whitechapel is related. In these vignettes, Doré recorded the details of London’s broad social panorama, emphasizing the contrast between rich and poor. With his deft use of gouache and ink, he registered an agonizing vision of a dense crowd in a claustrophobic space. Images like Tavern in Whitechapel epitomize some of the horrors of 19th-century urban life with a piercing intensity foreign to many Impressionist artists.