In September 1843, Victor Hugo was on a sunlit walk while travelling with his mistress in the Pyrenees. He stepped into a café to rest, picked up a newspaper and read of a tragic accident in Normandy. On a calm day on the Seine, a sudden squall capsized a rowing boat carrying a young couple. She, 19 and pregnant, was pulled down by her heavy dress; he leapt into the water to save her; both drowned.
Hugo’s favourite child Léopoldine was already buried when he learned that day of her death. Devastated, he wrote little and published nothing for the next decade. But he did draw: as imaginatively, sensuously, eccentrically as one would expect, and with a naturally graceful line and compositional flair. Seventy superb pieces feature in the Royal Academy’s Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. Doubly appealing, the exhibition offers both biographical revelation and a scarcely known, very beautiful chapter in 19th-century graphic art in its heyday of Daumier and Doré.
Hugo had always sketched — 3,000 drawings survive. After 1843, however, he became a draughtsman of real originality and expressive depths, working in fine pencil, smoky charcoal, wet inks, gouache and coloured washes, repeatedly creating images of drowning and submerged worlds. For “The Wreck”, he dragged the feathered end of an ink-dipped quill across the page to depict overpowering waves. “City on the Rhine” is flooded in brown wash, the buildings hardly visible. The whole sheet for “Taches-Planètes” was soaked in water and splodged with pools of ink and stencilled circles.
Sometimes these works appear to be spontaneous explorations, paper randomly stained, blotted, streaked, but the most refined examples combine fluidity with intricate structure. Composed of many layers, the detailed tower of the dread “La Tour des Rats” — a Rhineland bastion where by legend a ruler burnt to death the poor, who returned as rats and devoured him — is dashed with teeming rain, evoked by pulling an inky cloth across the paper. Pen, ink, pencil, crayon and charcoal imitate stone and wood in the impenetrable interior “Hic Clavis, alias porta” (Here the key, elsewhere the door) — an allegory for the claustrophobia of grief.
Throughout, you feel immersed in a phantasmagoria of crumbling edifices and fog-shrouded Gothic remnants, evoking the twilit nostalgic sensibility of Hugo’s novels. The central room especially, devoted to Hugo’s obsession with castles, conjures The Hunchback of Notre-Dame’s elegiac romanticism: towers, turrets, crenellations emerge as a ghostly vision in “The Castle with the Angel”; in white gouache in the nocturne “Landscape with a Castle on a Cliff”; through purple washes in “The Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross”. A single looming figure is a hanged man, “Ecce Lex” — since Hugo’s 1829 polemic The Last Day of a Condemned Man, he campaigned against capital punishment.
In silvery light glowers Hugo’s largest, most ambitious drawing, “The Castle with the Cross” (captured here as an etching by Fortuné Louis-Méaulle), a fortress with weathered textures enclosing a labyrinthine medieval city, studded with black shadows, facing an elaborate crucifix.
But if Gothic fantasy reigns, every now and then some experimental mixed-media curiosity — a castle and winding stair imprinted with coloured lace in “Les Orientales”, a postage stamp collaged into “Taches and Silhouette of a Castle” — aligns Hugo instead with the 20th-century avant-garde.
Untrained, untethered by academic convention, he can be purely abstract — the flurry of ink blotches “Twilight, stubborn, black, hideous” — or darkly metamorphosing like the surrealists. A universe becomes a black pupil in “Planet-Eye”. Finger marks are blank heads surveying an abyss in “Ink-blackened Page with Half-moon and Fingerprints”. In a stunning scale reversal, a giant arachnid hovers above a minuscule city in “The Town of Vianden Seen Through a Spider’s Web”.
This is not to claim Hugo was a modernist in waiting. On the contrary, he was a medievalist, seeking in Gothic spirituality and ornament a refuge from the industrialising 19th century. In this sense he was an internal exile, cloistered in medieval imagining, even before he became in 1851 an actual political exile, opposing Napoleon III’s autocratic Second Empire.
Until Napoleon’s regime collapsed in 1870, Hugo lived in Guernsey. From a lookout at the top of his house, he wrote: “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 vista contributed to the drawings’ floating sensations and hybrid forms — one sketchbook brims with an orchestra of gargoyle-like human-animal musicians — and, when he returned to novel-writing, to Les Misérables (1862), suffused with drowning images, and his homage to the island Toilers of the Sea (1866).
The final room connects the Guernsey novel — story of Gilliatt, a fisherman battling to rescue an engine from a shipwreck and thus win his beloved — with drawings, including the black vortex “The Vision Ship, or The Last Struggle”, and the sublimely lovely “Octopus”, a single ink stain brushed into contours of body and limbs curling into the initials V H. Hiding in “the most beautiful azure of the limpid water”, this creature — “devil-fish . . . a glutinous mass possessed of a will . . . glue filled with hatred” — entraps Gilliatt.
Hugo professed himself optimistic, predicting a war-free 20th century and explaining Les Misérables as a “progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice . . . night to day”. The drawings, made “during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen”, are emotionally varied, expressing wonder, fear, loss.
In “Mushroom”, an enormous green and red fungus with eerie peering face rises above a destroyed landscape, uncannily anticipating nuclear apocalypse, not peace. In “The Shade of the Manchineel Tree”, the toxic tree — merely standing beneath it burns the skin — casts an inky skull as its reflection and double, twinning growth and death. An inscription sets the scene in the Pyrenees “breathing heat like the mouth of an oven”, where a man shelters only to find his sanctuary fatal, as Hugo did in the café when he discovered Léopoldine had drowned.
Hugo never exhibited his drawings, although they were known and praised in French romantic circles: Delacroix admired them; Théophile Gautier wrote that Hugo “excels in blending the chiaroscuro effects of Goya with the architectural terror of Piranesi”. That implies, though, a strategised aesthetic, whereas for Hugo a pleasure was freedom of style, giving form to dreams unconstrained by narrative demands. To Baudelaire, he explained: “I’ve ended up mixing in pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal dust, soot and all sorts of bizarre concoctions which manage to convey more or less what I have in view, and above all in mind.” To wander into that mind’s eye at the Royal Academy is a rare delight.
To June 29, royalacademy.org.uk
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