Astonishing Things, The Drawings of Victor Hugo
Royal Academy Of Arts, London
Robin Richmond, March 18, 2025
Mention the name of Victor Hugo to anyone, and it will be his panoramic novels Nôtre-Dame de Paris ( the Hunchback of Notre Dame) from 1831, and later Les Misérables from 1862, that come to mind. It’s hard not to think of tear-jerking Hollywood adaptations of his novels, crowd-pleasing musicals and sentimental television adaptations. I can’t find the exact source of this quote, but it conveys some of the intellectual snobbery around Victor Hugo. The story goes that when General de Gaulle’s acerbic Minister of Culture André Malraux (author, art theorist, Marxist and all-round intellectual) was asked to name France’s greatest writer he purportedly said
“ Victor Hugo, Hèlas.”
He couldn’t really name himself, though he probably wanted to.
Portrait by Etienne Carjat, 1875
And I kind of know what he meant. I have tried to read the big novels and have, to my great shame, never finished them. I’ve never seen Les Mis the musical either, but I am pleased that for the last 40 years, hundreds of actors have been kept in work by what they affectionately refer to as “the Glums”.
Victor Hugo, Undergrowth, 1847
But this is to underestimate an extraordinary man, a polymath who was so much more than a novelist. Victor-Marie Hugo, born in Besançon in 1802, during the reign of Napoleon I, was a poet, a pamphleteer, an MP of the Third Republic, a peer of the realm (a Pair de France) an activist, a philanthropist, a photographer, a printmaker, a designer, a visionary, and as we see here at the Royal Academy, a very very very fine artist indeed. A pillar of 19th century French society, his politics underwent a seismic shift during his long eventful life, moving from a staunch admiration of the restored Bourbon Kings Louis XVIII and Charles X to a devout dedication to the ideas of free speech, universal suffrage, and the abolition of the death penalty. When he died, in 1885 aged 83, his body lay in state at the Arc de Triomphe, and was visited by millions of mourning citizens, before its internment in the glorious Panthèon (where Malraux also resides). And yet he spent 19 years in exile, first in Brussels, then on the island of Jersey, and then Guernsey, only returning to France in 1870, where he was met at the Gare du Nord by a thousand shouts of “Vive Victor Hugo!”. I am currently enjoying a television adaptation of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) the elegiac novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa which chronicles Sicily’s social upheaval during Garibaldi’s Risorgimento. This book covers the same tumultuous period as Hugo’s novels and illustrates the painful tug of war between tradition and modernity. In 2025, Victor Hugo’s free thinking political philosophy is extraordinarily prescient. In 1870, on Bastille Day, at the very moment that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia, Hugo planted an oak tree that he called “the United States of Europe”. If only such a federation (pace Brexit) really existed. In his writing Hugo foresees inevitable global conflict and he scathingly talks of Napoleon as belonging to a “cluster of vagabonds”, likening the Emperor to “a toadstool (that) sprouts at the bottom of the oak, but that is not the oak.” A drawing of a mushroom from 1850 includes a hidden human face in its stem. Is that him? Is it Napoleon? Is it us?
Victor Hugo, Mushroom, 1850
Hugo’s drawings are very rarely exhibited and rarely travel. They are as light as feathers, and indeed he often uses feathers dipped in ink instead of quills or brushes. He is innovative. He uses soot and coffee as well as ink and charcoal. The drawings are very delicate and susceptible to light. Some are tiny. They are tenebrous, magical, amazingly skilled and controlled, and perhaps, though not possessing quite the genius that was Rembrandt’s (“I would have liked to be a second Rembrandt “), the very immodest Hugo is a very good painter. In his life there were so many contradictions. A devotee of the monarchy, then later a devout Republican. An Academician and then a mouthpiece for the sans culottes. A man who eschewed company in his rooftop eerie overlooking the English Channel, and then a man of the people. His drawings explore these contradictions. Darkness and light. Vincent Van Gogh has given this show its title. He called Hugo’s drawings “astonishing things” and he was right.