These achieved great international success, and he became renowned for printmaking, although his role was normally as the designer only; at the height of his career some 40 block-cutters were employed to cut his drawings onto the wooden printing blocks, usually also signing the image.

[1] He created over 10,000 illustrations, the most important of which were copied using an electrotype process using cylinder presses, allowing very large print runs to be published simultaneously in many countries.

In 1856 he produced 12 folio-size illustrations of The Legend of The Wandering Jew, which propagated longstanding antisemitic views of the time,[7] for a short poem which Pierre-Jean de Béranger had derived from a novel of Eugène Sue of 1845.

[8][9][10] In the 1860s he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes's Don Quixote, and his depictions of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza, became so famous that they influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors' ideas of the physical "look" of the two characters.

[11] Doré also illustrated an oversized edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", an endeavor that earned him 30,000 francs from publisher Harper & Brothers in 1883.

Jerrold had obtained the idea from The Microcosm of London produced by Rudolph Ackermann, William Pyne, and Thomas Rowlandson (published in three volumes from 1808 to 1810).

It enjoyed commercial and popular success, but the work was disliked by some contemporary British critics, as it appeared to focus on the poverty that existed in parts of London.

[citation needed] The medical doctor Jean-Baptiste Fuzier, who was a specialist in yellow fever and other tropical diseases, bequeathed watercolor paintings by Doré to the museum of Grenoble in 1880.

[39] Théophile Gautier for example stated "Nobody better than this artist can give a mysterious and deep vitality to chimeras, dreams, nightmares, intangible shapes bathed in light and shade, weirdly caricatured silhouettes and all the monsters of fantasy.