Doré’s imagination fed on grandeur and grief. He treated vision as architecture, precision as devotion. Critics called him excessive; time called him inevitable. His influence bled into Symbolism, cinema, and surrealism alike—each frame a warning, a hymn, a wound still breathing ink.

The Musée d'Orsay explicitly credits him as a founding father of the comic strip form, tracing back to text-comics he created in the late 1840s like Les Travaux d'Hercule — placing an artist known primarily for classic-literature illustration at the literal origin point of an entirely separate modern medium.

His influence on film is extraordinary and well-documented: virtually every Biblical film since 1902 references his illustrations, Dante and Don Quixote adaptations from Orson Welles to Terry Gilliam draw on his imagery, and his primeval forests directly informed every version of King Kong through Peter Jackson's, while Georges Lucas cited him for Chewbacca and George Méliès for A Trip to the Moon.

Published in 1866 alongside the controversy of Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, "Doré's Bible" sparked a lasting revival of religious art across Europe for the following thirty years — never before had scripture been illustrated with such imaginative scale, and its influence extended into stage productions, magic lantern shows, and Passion plays.

Mixed at best — like his exact contemporary Édouard Manet, Doré faced persistent critical rejection, particularly for his ambitions as a painter and sculptor, and it wasn't until decades after his death that institutions like the Musée d'Orsay and National Gallery of Canada mounted major retrospectives establishing him as a central figure of 19th-century visual culture.

His 1863 illustrations were so vivid that Émile Zola declared Doré hadn't merely illustrated Cervantes's novel but rewritten it — "instead of having one masterpiece, the human mind has two" — and Doré's visual conception of the knight and Sancho Panza went on to shape how subsequent readers, artists, and filmmakers pictured the characters for generations.

Rather than depicting the polished Victorian capital British audiences expected, Doré and writer Blanchard Jerrold explored London's disreputable districts at night with a police escort, and critics accused Doré of "inventing rather than copying" — yet the unflinching social realism deeply impressed Vincent van Gogh, who painted his own version of Doré's Prisoners' Round in the final year of his life.