By James Brewer
Victor Hugo, the wonderfully prolific French writer, “is just as splendid as Rembrandt,” wrote Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother. Whether Vincent was referring to Hugo’s novels or to his many drawings on paper is unclear, but there was no doubt that Vincent discerned what he called “astonishing things.”
Hugo’s mystery-suffused sketches, many of which were not intended for the eyes of the public, were drawn a century and a half ago, from around 1856 to 1871.
The author of the internationally famed Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miseìrables and much elseproved himself a master of gothic pictorial realism. He was obsessed with medieval castles both real and fanciful, and with everything associated with the ocean. The ocean’s boundless, ever-changing nature served as both a metaphor for his creative process and a profound source of artistic inspiration, say the experts behind the Royal Academy’s exhibition Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo.
Introducing 70 of the mostly small-scale, fragile ink-and-wash drawings on paper at the first show of its kind in the UK for just over 50 years, Andrea Tarsia, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, spoke of Hugo’s extraordinary visual imagination.
Sarah Lea, who led the curation, added: “These are certainly the drawings of a writer… he does not leave us very much commentary of the drawings themselves. The drawings were largely private during his lifetime. There are times when writing is not going well, he turns to drawing. The idea that architecture is a kind of writing is very interesting to him.” But “he was never intending to be an artist.”
Hugo’s visions of medieval architecture, monsters and seascapes were as expressive as his writing, his treatment of both disciplines eventually inspiring Symbolist poets, and artists from Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst to contemporary figures such as the American Raymond Pettibon with his stylised ink drawings, and British sculptor Antony Gormley.
This landmark exhibition features Hugo’s works, minuscule to mid-size, borrowed from European collections. It is extraordinary to learn that Hugo produced a tidal wave of more than 4,000 drawings of which 3,000 survive. He was untrained and initially drew caricatures to entertain his friends and family. While travelling he began to sketch landscapes, especially in the realms of mountains and castles, venturing later into bravura experiments with abstraction.
His forthright opposition to the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III) resulted in him being banished, fleeing first to Brussels in December 1851, the following year to Jersey, and then to Guernsey in 1855, where he stayed until 1870.
As the influence of the sea swelled upon him in the Channel Islands, he called himself ‘Ocean Man,’ (homme océan). His home for more than 15 years was the five-floor Hauteville House, for which he chose the décor and contents. These included a battered mirror whose wooden frame he painted with colourful birds.
He built a lookout in his new home on the top floor, which offered sweeping views over Saint Peter Port (chief town and port of Guernsey) and the open sea, with glimpses of the distant French coastline. He related: “Thoughtfully, I write at my window. I watch the flow being born, expiring, reborn, and the gulls cutting through the air. The ships in the wind open their wingspans and look in the distance like large figures strolling on the sea.”
The parallel creative forces of writing, and of drawing – a phenomenon that exceeds language – converged, with the rhythm of Hugo’s prose echoed in illustrations pertaining to his 1866 novel The Toilers of the Sea, set in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. This tells of a Guernsey fisherman who battles the relentless deep to salvage the engines of a steamship named Durande to try to win the love of the shipowner’s niece. Hugo portrayed fierce storms and a giant, menacing Octopus, which emerges from a cave seeking to trap the plucky mariner in its billowing tentacles.
The sea in that tale is a wrathful adversary rather than a muse. Hugo deployed his skills in pen, brown ink and wash for The Durande Ship After Sinking, and in black ink for The Wreck. The latter involved Hugo dipping the feathered end of a quill, or perhaps just a feather, into the ink and dragging it over the page to represent the contours of the waves.
The same section of the exhibition includes drawings relating to Les Misérables, such as Chain, 1864 and some of Hugo’s largest works, such as The Lighthouse at Casquets, Guernsey, and an example of his drawings of the mid-1870s which continued to address marine themes.
While on Guernsey, Hugo took daily walks around the island and often swam in the sea. On October 22, 1857, he recorded his 123rd swim at Havelet Bay, a sandy beach near Hauteville House. He would collect pebbles from the beach, writing his name and the date on each of them. There is another portrait of an octopus, which he must have seen from the Guernsey rocks. There are photographs of Hugo by his sons, Charles and François-Victor, taken on the beach in Jersey, although he is too distant to be recognised.
Hugo was impressed by the “Burgs” (castles, fortresses, and walled towns) he saw as he travelled along the Rhine in 1839 and 1840, and this gave rise to some of his most awe-inspiring drawings, ranging from the romantic to the sinister. The solidity of architecture conveyed by the drawings puts one in mind of the title of a hymn composed in the 1520s by Martin Luther: Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, ein gute Wehr und Waffen (Our God is a mighty fortress, a sure defence and weapon). Hugo even wrote a travel guide called “Le Rhin” (The Rhine).
Four times he stayed in the town of Vianden, in the north of what is now Luxembourg, lodging where he had a grand view of its feudal castle, one of the largest of its kind west of the Rhine. He wrote some 50 poems during that time, and presciently observed: “Vianden, embedded in a splendid landscape, will be visited one day by tourists from the whole of Europe, attracted both by its sinister but magnificent ruin and by its cheerful and happy people.” Now restored, the castle is certainly a big tourist attraction in the 21st century. Hugo drew The Cheerful Castle, c 1847 (Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/ Guernsey); The Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross, 1871 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris); and The Town and Castle of Vianden by Moonlight (1871).
On one occasion in 1871 in Vianden, Hugo is said to have joined firemen in putting out a blaze by organising a line of water buckets. To add to his romantic outlook on the town, it seems that he fell in love with an 18-year-old named Marie Mercier who like him had been a republican activist in France. She started working for Hugo and returned to France in 1872.
In the enigmatic and high wattage drawing Mushroom, 1850 (Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/ Guernsey), a giant almost-humanoid toadstool has a face peering from its stem as it stands in front of a post-apocalyptic landscape.
He lived life in an operatic vein. His instincts – he came to symbolise the ideals of equality and of freedom, of the French Republic – led him to campaign against the death penalty. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a portrait of a hanged man. He had campaigned, to no avail, in Guernsey to save a convicted murderer called John Tapner, and a few years later gave permission for the drawing to be made into a print protesting against the execution of the American anti-slavery activist John Brown. Hugo’s brother-in-law Paul Chenay made print reproductions of the Ecce Lex drawings, which were published under a new title, John Brown.
We get an insight into the artist’s home-made drawing process, with materials from fine pencil to inks, charcoal, graphite and wash. In a series including Lace and Spectres, c 1855-56 (Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/ Guernsey) he uses blots, rubbings, imprints of ink-soaked lace, washes – and automatic writing, reflecting his compulsive interest in séances and the occult world. All the vernacular elements reveal how figuration and abstraction were in constant flux. The indeterminacy of some of Hugo’s darker and smaller images does not detract from their power. It characterises an artist who rejects any glib approach. If art could be fully explained, it would not be necessary (as the maestro Daniel Barenboim once said in respect to the symphony).
For his castle figurations Hugo employed stencils to create tonal contrasts. On display is a 1 m wide, multi-plate print by French engraver Fortuné-Louis Méaulle dated 1875, that recreates Hugo’s most ambitious drawing The Castle with the Cross, 1850 (Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/Guernsey).
The author/artist was intrigued by the new craze for photography, unsurprisingly given his appreciation of chiaroscuro. With his penchant for paintings of Gothic citadels, one could imagine him as director of a 20th century horror movie.
The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy in collaboration with Paris Musées – Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Rose Thompson of the Royal Academy participated in the curation with Sarah Lea.
The opening of the event coincided with the staging of a protest over a planned restructuring at the Royal Academy which could lead to job cuts. Concerned that 100 jobs were at risk, some 50 members of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) took part in a demonstration outside the RA. At the time of writing, the RA, which like many arts institutions in the UK is under financial pressure, stated that of 60 roles that could be scrapped, almost half were already vacant. The RA does not receive direct government funding and relies for income on ticket sales, donations, sponsorship, commercial activities and its membership scheme.
Images:
Ship in a storm, 1875. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
The Wreck, 1864-66. Pen, black ink and wash on paper. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
The Durande Ship After Sinking, 1864-66, pen, brown ink and wash on paper. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
The Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross, 1871. Brown and black ink, brown and purple wash, graphite and varnish on paper. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.
Mirror with Birds, 1870. Hand-painted and inscribed wooden frame, oil paint, varnish. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/ Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maisons de Victor Hugo.
Mushroom, 1850. Pen, brown ink and wash, charcoal, crayon, green, red and white gouache on paper. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/ Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maisons de Victor Hugo.
Octopus, 1866–69. Brown ink and wash and graphite on paper. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.
Lace and Spectres, c. 1855-56. Pen and brown ink wash, charcoal and lace imprint on paper. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris/ Guernsey. Photo : CCØ Paris Musées/ Maison de Victor Hugo.
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, is in the Jillian and Arthur M Sackler Wing of the Royal Academy, London, until June 29, 2025.
