Gustave Doré's illustrations for La Grande Bible de Tours

The French translation known as the Bible de Tours had originally been published in 1843 and was done by Jean Jacques Bourassé (1813–1872) and Pierre Désiré Janvier (1817–1888).

The illustrations were immensely successful and have been reproduced countless times worldwide, influencing the visual arts and popular culture in ways difficult to measure.

Doré's artistic reasons for undertaking the Bible project are outlined by his biographer, Joanna Richardson: It offered him an almost endless series of intensely dramatic events.

They also reveal many elements by now familiar in Doré's work: the mountain scenes, the lurid skies, the complicated battles, the almost unremitting brutalism.

Doré's illustrations of the Old Testament remind us, above all, of the God of Wrath: of massacres and murders, decapitations and avenging angels.