Victor Hugo Drawings

Victor Hugo’s Artwork Is Really Great.

The Royal Academy’s London exhibit on Victor Hugo’s ink artwork was terrific! You may know him as the author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but he was also a tremendously dedicated politician, poet, and–evidently–artist!

A few things I learned about Hugo: He started out as a royalist, but from 1851 on, as a political exile in Guernsey (Channel Islands), he became a revolutionary idealist, supporting the leftist Communards and opposing capital punishment and the death penalty. Hugo was an early advocate for a European Union, or “United States of Europe” as he called it. He traveled widely and maintained a multimodal travel diary (drawings and notes). He became interested in spiritualism and automatic writing/drawing, pre-dating the surrealists by years. Hugo’s art reflects all of this.

The exhibit had a good book as well, which I probably should have gotten… some of my photos have unfortunate glass reflections. The blockquotes you see below are OCR’ed and reviewed by me from pics of the exhibition panels.

The inscription reads:

“It was siesta time. It was midday and the sun was shining in triumph. The vast, bare plain breathed heat like the mouth of an oven. He looked, for a tree in whose shade he could. sleep and rest. He came across a Manchineel tree.”

Native to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the Manchineel trees are so toxic that sheltering beneath them during rain can cause burns, and their fruits, when ingested, can be lethal.

Beginning in 1834, Hugo kept travel journals to capture things that caught his eye. He filled sketchbooks with precise pencil drawings of coastal cliffs, cobbled streets, architectural details and floorplans, sometimes later reworked in ink. During the late 1840s, Hugo's preoccupation with landscape and the atmospheric effects of weather or times of day drove his experimental techniques. These innovations culminated in a series of large-scale pictures, including the enigmatic Mushroom [👇], made in Paris in 1850, a politically tumultuous time for Hugo.

This was done prior to being exiled to the Channel Islands… a weird picture of a giant poisonouse shroom over a post-apocalyptic landscape. Impossible to photograph!

Castles

Hugo had a lifelong obsession with castles. The motif of the burg (from the German for castle, fortress or walled town) stemmed from his interest in the Middle Ages, and it featured in many of his writings. While some depictions recall real structures he encountered during his European travels, especially along the Rhine, Hugo often created fantastical castles, ranging from whimsical and colourful to stark and foreboding.

In a letter to his son Charles: “The day I drew it [☝️], the sky in which it was vanishing had something violent and tumultuous about it. You’ll notice at the bottom of the neighbouring mountain the face of a giant with his mouth open. I’ve drawn it very precisely.”

This multi-plate print [☝️]was engraved to 1:1 scale after Hugo's largest drawing. The original was created in 1850, and remained in France during his exile, protected by his close friend Paul Meurice. Hugo appreciated the skill of the engraver Méaulle in ‘translating’ his drawing into the fine matrix of engraved lines seen here. On Hugo's return in 1871, he created the bespoke frame [not shown here] and gave the work to Meurice, who would later found the museum that now holds the primary collection of Hugo's art.

Although many of his works are reminiscent of buildings seen on his European travels, Hugo particularly enjoyed depicting fictitious castles. He routinely used stencils while doing so, selecting positive and negative silhouettes to create tonal contrasts. Here [☝️]he applies a paper stencil and applies a background wash over the top, later adding architectural details to the negative area.

Created in Luxembourg, after being exiled from Belgium for offering asylum to Communards. “I draw in my travel book the large spider’s web through which we see the ruin of Vianden like a spectre.”

Ink Stains and Spiritualism

In Jersey (1852-55), Hugo engaged with table-turning seances in the hope of contacting the spirits of the dead. When drawing, he continued to explore unconventional methods like ink blots, rubbings, lace prints, stencils and collaged elements, such as postage stamps. Some compositions are entirely abstract; these are known as taches, translated as 'stains' or 'accidental marks'. These mysterious drawings express Hugo's interest in unconscious creativity. His experiments with 'automatic' processes long predate the Surrealist movement that adopted similar techniques in the 1920s, and reveal his ability to meld artistic innovation with deeply personal and symbolic themes.

The Death Penalty

Hugo wrote an early novella (1829) expressing opposition to the death penalty, Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, which Wikipedia suggests had a strong influence on Dickens, Camus, and Dostoevsky.

His role as a politician in France, and his interest in current events and people - specifically his opposition to capital punishment - informed a number of his drawings. Following the 1884 execution of John Tapner in Guernsey, Hugo created a series of powerfully graphic drawings depicting a man being hanged, of which Ecce Lex is one. Later, in 1859, he passionately appealed for a pardon for John Brown, an American abolitionist sentenced to death. His campaign was unsuccessful, and he wrote to the London News condemning Brown's execution, declaring it a moral and political tragedy. Hugo's drawing known as Le Pendu (the hanged man) was reproduced as a print bearing Brown's name.

Guernsey 1855-1870

This greeting [☝️] was probably sent to a friend, although the recipient is unknown. Hugo has soaked lace in red ink to make a print, enriching the layered textures of the composition. Here, as elsewhere, Hugo added his surname in the foreground, overshadowing the ruins of a church or a castle in the background. Hugo made this drawing while in exile from France on Guernsey (1855-70), following his outspoken attacks on Napoléon III.

His house on Guernsey, restored and decorated by him.

The Ocean

Nicknamed 'ocean man' (homme océan), a term Hugo coined, the influence of the sea became particularly prominent during his exile on Guernsey (1855-1870). Between 1861 and 1862 while in residence at Hauteville House, Hugo constructed the lookout on the top floor which offered sweeping views over Saint Peter Port and the open sea, with glimpses of the French coastline in the distance. This vantage point became his sanctuary for reflection and creation. As Hugo wrote: '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.'

During his exile, Hugo published Les Misérables (1862), chronicling France's political upheavals, and Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea) (1866), a novel dedicated to the island of Guernsey. The latter tells the story of Gilliatt, a solitary figure often considered to be based on the author, who battles the sea's relentless forces to salvage the engines of a steam ship and win the love of Déruchette, the ship-owner's niece. A series of related drawings portray fierce storms and a menacing octopus, underscoring the sea's duality as both adversary and muse. Here, the parallel creative processes of writing and drawing converge, with the rhythms of Hugo's prose echoing the ebb and flow of his inky compositions.

Hugo returned from Guernsey in 1870, and died on 22 May 1885, aged 83. He was given a state funeral, attended by over 2 million people. According to Wikipedia:

Throughout his life Hugo kept believing in unstoppable humanistic progress. In his last public address on 3 August 1879 he prophesied, in an over-optimistic way, "In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live."