The Enigma by Gustave Doré buy oil canvas Ready to Hang Painting

For Gustave Doré, brought into the world in Stasbourg, France's loss against Prussia in 1870, bringing about the deficiency of Alsace-Lorraine, addresses a significant wellspring of burden. Soon after the finish of the conflict, he made three fantastic works, The Puzzler, The Dark Bird of Prussia and The Safeguard of Paris, all in shades of grayness, introduced under the general title Keepsakes of 1870 at the post mortem offer of the craftsman's studio in 1884.
Of the three works of buy art, The Riddle is without a doubt the most disastrous. At the highest point of a slope flung with bodies, stands a sphinx, a legendary beast with a lion's body and a human head. Somewhere out there, discharge vapor ascend from a Paris copied by foe weapons. Under the dim sky, a winged lady, maybe the epitome of France, appears to asking the sphinx. This one appears to be brimming with empathy, nearer to the sphinx of the Egyptian religion, watchman of the underground world, than to the beast crossed by Oedipus in Greek folklore.
Through this picture of the 1870 conflict, Doré gets back to the whole-world destroying dreams of his outlines for Dante's Damnation (1861). More than rout, he presumably needs to spell almost certain doom for a world.

Humanity facing the horrors of defeat.