Victor Hugo’s Drawings Go on Show

The Royal Academy of Arts in London is presenting a comprehensive survey of politician, author, and artist Victor Hugo’s rarely seen works on paper.

Featuring around 70 artworks from important European collections, Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo follows Hugo’s preoccupation with drawing, from his early caricatures and travel drawings to his dramatic landscapes and his experiments with abstraction.

Victor Hugo was a leading public figure in 19th century France. As both a poet and a politician, and during his near 20 year exile in the Channel Islands, he came to symbolise the ideals of the French Republic: equality and freedom. In private, his refuge was drawing. Hugo’s ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writing yet were rarely seen in public during his lifetime. 

His art and writing went on to inspire Symbolist poets, and many artists, from Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, to contemporary artists such as Raymond Pettibon and Antony Gormley RA. Vincent van Gogh compared his artwork to “astonishing things”.

Arranged thematically, the exhibition opens with a section entitled Writing and Drawing, addressing the relationship between Hugo’s artistic and literary work. These were parallel creative tracks for Hugo, writing for the public and drawing as a private activity shared with family and close friends. For Hugo, writing and drawing shared important metaphorical structures based on concepts of nature and time that underpin his attitudes to history, culture and humanity. These viewpoints emerge in motifs such as ruins and mountains or an interest in the slippage of scale between the monumental and the minute, as in the enigmatic drawing Mushroom, 1850 which depicts a giant anthropomorphic toadstool.