Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo

The Royal Academy’s new exhibition reveals the mighty French novelist as a fascinating, ever-experimental artist

Victor Hugo, Octopus, 1866–69 (detail). Brown ink and wash and graphite on paper, 24 x 20.7 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.

Royal Academy of Art, London
21 March – 29 June 2025

by JOE LLOYD

In a letter written from the Saint-Paul Asylum in January 1890, Vincent van Gogh compared Victor Hugo’s work to the “astonishing things” of the illustrator Daniel Vierge. We do not know if Van Gogh was making a comparison with Hugo’s drawings or his literary work. He frequently praised Hugo’s writings: in 1880, he had called them “just as splendid as Rembrandt”. In the same letter, he had unfavourably paralleled Hugo’s drawings of gothic buildings with the etchings of Charles Meryon, the colourblind chronicler of 19th-century Paris.

Victor Hugo, The Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross, 1871. Brown and black ink, brown and purple wash, graphite and varnish on paper, 25 x 34.5 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.

Whatever Van Gogh’s full assessment of Hugo’s drawings, they are indeed astonishing things: inky and vaporous, delicately perched between observation and imagination. He shows us the shadowy silhouette of a town through a spider’s web, itself seen through a veranda. He shows us a mushroom that appears to have the dimensions of a vast tree. It stands before a post-apocalyptic landscape, with what looks like a face peering out of its stem. There are precipitous cliffs and a whole encyclopedia of castles, from murky ruins to cheerful piles. Hugo was a famous defender of France’s medieval architecture, and the gothic hangs like a thick fog over his work, where the past is blurred into fantasy. The Town and Castle of Vianden by Moonlight (1871) is a case in point. In the foreground, there is a row of closely observed timber-framed houses. The castle above them, however, is shrouded in mist like an illustration for a macabre fairytale.

Victor Hugo, Lace and Spectres, c1855-56, Pen and brown ink wash, charcoal and lace imprint on paper, 7.2 x 6.1 cm. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maison de Victor Hugo.

Hugo was one of the towering public figures of the 19th century. He was novelist and poet, politician and political exile. His state funeral attracted the largest crowd in French history. Yet although he produced more than 4,000 drawings, they constitute something of a back alley in the dense cityscape of his career. They are seldom exhibited because of their fragility. The present show is the first in Britain for half a century. The drawings were relatively private in his lifetime. With the exception of a small number of published prints, they were known only to his confidantes. Eugène Delacroix said Hugo would have been “the greatest of the century” if he had focused on art. This may have been flattery. But Hugo was definitely an artist of serious talent.

Victor Hugo, The Cheerful Castle, c1847. Pen, brown and black ink and wash, crayon on cardboard, 15.8 x 22.2 cm. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maisons de Victor Hugo.

He was untrained and initially drew to entertain his friends and family. His first works were caricatures. While travelling in the 1830s and 1840s, he started to sketch the landscapes he beheld, especially the mountains and castles that haunted the Romantic imagination, generally using writer’s ink and pen strokes. He learned to emulate the best printmakers, including Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya; in 1837, he even wrote a 38-line poem in tribute to the former. Drawing became more central to Hugo’s creative practice in 1843, after the death of his favourite daughter Léopoldine in a boating accident. He paused his literary writing. In public, he devoted himself to politics. But at home he developed his drawing technique.

Victor Hugo, The Town of Vianden Seen Through a Spider’s Web, 1871. Brown ink and wash, and blue watercolour over graphite on paper, 25.5 x 30.3 cm. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maisons de Victor Hugo.

Over these years, Hugo began to use a distinctive combination of charcoal, ink, lithographic pencils and wax crayons to create dusky, tenebrous images. He experimented with different processes, such as stencils. He applied charcoal with matchsticks. He wet his drawings to create blended effects. He even used coffee grounds and soot. For La Tour des Rats (1847), a vision of a ruined tower on a small island in the Rhine, he drew ink across paper with a cloth to create rain. While drawings traditionally make use of blank space, Hugo often covered every inch of his surfaces. Take, for instance, The Dead City (c1850), in which the spectre of a gothic skyline can be glimpsed through an ink-black sky.

Victor Hugo, Mirror with Birds, 1870. Hand-painted and inscribed wooden frame, oil paint, varnish, 70 x 65 cm. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maisons de Victor Hugo.

Around the same time, Hugo stopped drawing from life and began to focus on the products of memory and imagination. He came to conceive his art as part of the same project as his writings, a place where ideas could be worked out. Sometimes these were political, as with Ecce Lex (1854), a heart-stopping image of a hanged man that was later reproduced as a print campaigning against the death sentence of American abolitionist John Brown. But more often they were fanciful.

His drawings seldom directly illustrate his books, but they sometimes touch on the same imaginative seams. The final section of the exhibition features Hugo’s drawings of the ocean, made during his 18-year exile in the Channel Islands. Here, he wrote The Toilers of the Sea (1866), a novel set in Guernsey, and drew a series of works fixated with the ocean. There are octopuses and sea serpents, roiling waves and a lighthouse that resemble Tolkienian fantasy over any real structure. These remarkable drawings, which evoke a sort of cosmic deep, would serve as inspiration for the novel; some of them featured in his own manuscript copy.

Victor Hugo, Chain, 1864. Pen and brown ink on paper, 19.2 x 26 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.

In Jersey, he became a regular user of the talking board, using it to communicate with Léopoldine as well as sundry historical luminaries. Connected to this, he became intrigued by the idea of surrendering control in his drawing. In one 1856 sketchbook, he seems to use continuous pencil lines to create random forms on a page, which he then augments to transform into imaginary monsters and musicians. He started creating works using ink stains. Some of them resemble Rorschach tests, others aqueous abstract paintings. Ink-blackened Page with Half-moon and Fingerprints (1864-65) might feature a bustling crowd of head-like fingerprints looking over a curved parapet, as if peering down on the beholder from a lofty height. Or it could be an arrangement of marks.

Victor Hugo, Mushroom, 1850. Pen, brown ink and wash, charcoal, crayon, green, red and white gouache on paper, 47.4 x 60.8 cm. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernsey. Photo: CCØ Paris Musées / Maisons de Victor Hugo.

Hugo was not a man averse to self-aggrandisement. When he returned from exile in 1870, he was convinced his countrymen would elect him dictator. Yet he had a more circumspect view of his drawings. In 1863, he wrote modestly of “these things people insist on calling my drawings … made in the margins or on the covers of manuscripts during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen”. But these strange and astonishing things are far from mere marginalia. They show the roving mind of a genius at work, unencumbered by precedent or convention.