This is the world of Cervantes' knight-errant as Gustave Doré cut it into steel in 1863: cross-hatched engraving laid over the dry gray plains of La Mancha. Ink lines do the heavy lifting — windmills looming like giants, a gaunt hidalgo on a bony horse, dust and thistle scratched into being with thousands of parallel burin strokes.

Colour is withheld and precious. The ground is a cool dry-paper gray, so the rust of the earth and the ochre of the wheat feel like the only warm things for miles. It reads as a Spanish Golden Age chapbook that fell into a Romantic illustrator's hands — hatched skies, terracotta capitals, and a plate mark framing every image.