Although many of us won’t actually have read either of the 19th-century writer Victor Hugo’s most famous novels (Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), there’s a chance that we’ve all seen at least one of them, either on film or on stage. Very few will be familiar with the body of work now on display at the Royal Academy in London — his strange and marvellous drawings, reports The Times.
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo includes 70 of the more than 4,000 that are known. Dating from between 1834 and 1875 (ish — it was a private activity and he tended not to date them unless part of a letter), they’re a fascinating glimpse into a multifaceted creative mind.
Hugo (1802-1885) was something of an all-rounder. Draughtsman, poet, playwright and novelist, he was also a gifted interior designer: he even said he was “born to be a decorator” — and his style was pretty out there, indicated by some fabulous photographs of his home, Hauteville House in St Peter Port, Guernsey, and a few gloriously OTT designs. Oh, and he was an influential politician, starting out as a royalist — his father served as a general under Napoleon I — but shifting over time to become a thorn in the side of Napoleon III, publishing incendiary pamphlets against him from exile in Guernsey.
It was Van Gogh who described Hugo’s drawings as “astonishing things”. Idiosyncratic, freely experimental, soaked in atmosphere and alive with stories, this is drawing as thought; a direct outlet for a lively imagination, the pen and the charcoal simply the lightning rods through which ideas burst into the world.
See more of this illustrated report from The Times.