Drawings by Victor Hugo

Books for the public, drawings for the private: that was the attitude of the famous writer Victor Hugo (1802-1885). The author and politician, who is best known today for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), sought his private refuge in drawing. He produced caricatures, especially in his younger years, and later also travel drawings, landscapes and experimental abstractions. During his lifetime, Hugo showed his works almost exclusively to family and close friends; they were only very rarely exhibited in public. The drawings impressed various artists; Vincent van Gogh described them as »astonishing things«. Other artists such as André Breton and Max Ernst described how Hugo's drawings served as inspiration for them. The Royal Academy of Arts is showing 70 selected works in the exhibition Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, which can be seen in London from March 21 to June 29. The last time Hugo's drawings were part of an exhibition in the United Kingdom was over 50 years ago.

The show with the rarely shown exhibits is divided into four sections. It begins with Writing and Drawing, which illustrates the relationship between Hugo's artistic and literary work. Hugo saw a common foundation in both, based on his views on culture and humanity. Observation and Imagination shows landscapes and buildings that Hugo drew from real-life models. Fantasy and Reality, on the other hand, focuses on Hugo's enthusiasm for castles. In his works, Hugo combines memories of real-life examples, which he mixes with freely invented architecture and landscapes. Hugo also experimented with printmaking to depict his castles, as visitors will learn in this section. The final section is Ocean, Hugo's artistic leitmotif. Here you can also see photos of Hugo on the beach during his exile on the island of Jersey, which his sons took of him.