Victor Hugo’s Astonishing Drawings: A Royal Academy Exhibition.
- Team Written
- Mar 19
- 6 min read
Few literary figures occupy a more commanding place in the global imagination than Victor Hugo—celebrated author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Yet Hugo’s creativity extended far beyond the written page. Over the course of his life, he produced around 4,000 drawings, many kept private for decades. Now, for the first time in over fifty years, a selection of these seldom-exhibited pieces goes on view in London under the banner of “Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo.”
Opening on March 21 and running until June 29, 2025, Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo will be housed in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at Burlington House, part of the Royal Academy of Arts. Organized in partnership with Paris Musées – Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the exhibition brings together approximately 70 drawings from major European collections—an undertaking requiring meticulous coordination. Due to the fragile nature of these centuries-old works, special controls on lighting and humidity are paramount, underscoring the privilege of seeing them in person.
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a titan of French literature, but few realize that he was also an extraordinarily prolific visual artist. Many of his drawings emerged during his exile on the Channel Islands (1852–1870), a near two-decade period of intense political and personal upheaval. He often worked in ink wash, charcoal, gouache, ink rubbing, and watercolor, blending methods that anticipated future art movements like Surrealism. These compositions vary from quick notations to fully realized scenes brimming with layered washes and swirling, abstract shapes. While some refer to Hugo’s “secret” artworks, they were never bound into a single “sketchbook.” Rather, they form a broad, private oeuvre that remained largely unseen in his time. Two curatorial sections for the Royal Academy show are “Writing and Drawing” and “Ocean”—themes reflecting Hugo’s deep fascination with text-image interplay and the elemental power of the sea. From storm-lashed coastlines to ink-splattered castles, these pieces shine a light on an artistic mind constantly bridging the worlds of the literary and the visual.
Hugo’s approach to drawing was markedly experimental. He employed brown or black ink washes layered with charcoal or lithographic crayon and topped with white or colored gouache for highlights. Some compositions, such as Planète (c.1854), showcase multiple techniques—ink wash over charcoal, accented by white gouache. Yet it was his love of chance effects that truly set him apart: soaking paper, rotating it to let ink pool into random shapes, creating Rorschach-like blots (which he termed taches), and sprinkling graphite or coffee grounds to develop organic textures.
He also made imprints with leaves or lace, cutting stencils to mask silhouettes and then pouring or rubbing ink around them for hazy, dreamlike outlines. Notably, he would sometimes flip a pen nib to use the feathered end as a brush for loose, “brushy” strokes that capture the agitation of sky or sea. Though self-taught, Hugo “remained indifferent to academic conventions,” forging a style that critics likened to Goya or Piranesi, while others saw parallels with the late abstractions of J.M.W. Turner. Eugène Delacroix famously declared that had Hugo devoted himself entirely to painting, he might have been “the greatest artist” of their era.
Although Hugo belonged chronologically to the Romantic period, his spontaneous ink washes and bold experimentation diverged sharply from established norms. Romantic painters often maintained recognizable subjects, even when exploring intense emotional themes, whereas Hugo frequently embraced abstract or semi-abstract forms. This unorthodox freedom presaged both Symbolist allegory and the automatic techniques of Surrealism. His drawings are a bridge between the Gothic drama of Romanticism and the experimental ethos of 20th-century modernism.
Many motifs woven through Hugo’s novels reappear in his drawings. The author of Notre-Dame de Paris famously called a cathedral a “book in stone,” and indeed his sketches teem with gothic arches, ruins, and haunted castles silhouetted against stormy skies. In one ink drawing, Silhouette of a Castle Struck by Lightning (1850s), the flash of light outlines a fortress battered by forces beyond its control—an apt metaphor for the dark twists in Hugo’s writing.
Water and the ocean, recurrent symbols in works like Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), also dominate Hugo’s art. He endowed water with dual aspects: provider and destroyer, life and death. In one drawing, Octopus with the initials V.H. (1866), the creature’s tentacles coil to form Hugo’s own initials, mirroring the dramatic battle between man and sea-beast in Toilers of the Sea. Similarly, an ink-and-wash wave titled “Ma destinée” (“My Destiny”) links the relentless ocean to Hugo’s personal struggles, especially after the tragic drowning of his daughter Léopoldine. The synergy between fiction and imagery is unmistakable, as if Hugo were illustrating themes he had already voiced in prose.
No less important is Hugo’s intersection of political activism and art. A committed opponent of capital punishment, he forcefully addressed the theme in works like The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). That same moral fervor surfaces in drawings such as “Ecce Lex” (1854), depicting a hanged man. Hugo later published it under the title “John Brown,” protesting the American abolitionist’s execution. Thus his pen-and-ink images went beyond aesthetic experiment, becoming vehicles for social commentary—just as his novels and speeches fought for the downtrodden.
During Hugo’s lifetime, these drawings were a largely private obsession. Concerned that public acclaim as a painter might overshadow his literary prestige, he seldom displayed them. Only in 1888, three years after his death, was a public exhibition held in Paris. This prompted awestruck reactions from contemporaries like Charles Baudelaire (“Our poet is the king of landscape painters!”) and Théophile Gautier, who praised the “fierce fantasies” reminiscent of Goya’s chiaroscuro. By the early 20th century, Symbolists and Surrealists recognized Hugo as a prophetic figure for his bold, unrestrained techniques. André Breton even listed him among precursors of automatism. Later shows, including the 1998 New York exhibition and the 2018 “Stones to Stains” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, reaffirmed his posthumous reputation as a visionary artist who bridged centuries.
Hugo’s drawings also bear the imprint of his personal life. The death of his daughter Léopoldine in 1843 devastated him, ushering in an era where towering waves, storm-tossed ships, and engulfing seas began to dominate his output. He used ink and wash to express the power of water—a symbol of his grief and the uncontrollable forces shaping destiny. Likewise, his long exile in the Channel Islands provided fresh creative impetus. Politically isolated and spiritually restless, Hugo explored séances, “table-turning,” and an open-ended approach to chance imagery, pressing paper against ink to create blot patterns. In letters to friends, he turned his name into pictorial motifs, blending text and image in ways that dissolved the boundaries between writer and draftsman.
Hugo’s nearly twenty-year exile on Jersey and Guernsey stands as the most productive period for his artistic experimentation. The dramatic seascapes of the Channel Islands appear in countless drawings, from wave-battered rocks to lighthouses braving the elements. Away from the Parisian art scene, Hugo felt no compulsion to conform, leading him to develop collage effects, shadowy silhouettes, and a form of ink-blot “automatism” well before the Surrealists. When he returned to France in 1870, he carried home a portfolio filled with “wild ocean scenes and solitary landscapes,” a record of how isolation had liberated his creativity.
Hugo’s place in 19th-century art is singular. While he shared the emotive drama of the Romantics—think Delacroix or Théodore Chassériau—he pushed beyond their stylistic constraints, at times achieving near-abstraction. Symbolist artists admired his emphasis on spiritual and metaphysical themes, where each ruin or wave could be read as a symbolic stand-in for fate or ruin. Surrealists, meanwhile, hailed him as a proto-automatic artist; Max Ernst reportedly found inspiration in Hugo’s ink blots, which prefigured decalcomania decades before modernists adopted similar techniques. For these reasons, Hugo’s drawings inhabit a liminal space: they belong to the Romantic era yet leap toward the experimental vanguards of the 20th century.
Standing before Hugo’s drawings, viewers often sense parallels with the bleak grandeur of Les Misérables. Towering cliffs, tempestuous skies, monstrous silhouettes—they all echo a man who witnessed upheaval, heartbreak, and exile. Some visitors may find themselves surprised by the somber atmospheres and the fluid transitions from concrete forms to near-abstract blot patterns. Vincent van Gogh famously called these images “astonishing things,” praising the expressive power behind their simple materials. Yet with such emotional weight also comes the question of overblown expectations, in reality, many of Hugo’s drawings appear more like finished paintings, carefully balanced in composition yet tinted with a dreamlike spontaneity. Understanding Hugo’s background—his fierce activism, his personal losses, his innovative media—can greatly enhance visitors’ appreciation.
Taken as a whole, Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo is more than an art show—it is an invitation to witness how one of France’s greatest literary minds translated his visions into ink and wash. In these images, we find magnificent ruins, swirling seas, spectral apparitions, and a passionate engagement with the causes Hugo championed, from social justice to human dignity. The rare chance to encounter them face-to-face in London underscores the breadth of Hugo’s genius: he was at once novelist, poet, activist, and a daring innovator in visual art.
In an age that prizes clarity and empirical detail, Hugo’s drawings remind us that art can convey truths in subtler ways. Their swirling lines and shadowy forms spark empathy, reflection, and even discomfort—hallmarks of a creative spirit unafraid to probe the uncharted depths of the human condition. Exiled from his homeland, Hugo found freedom on the page and in the stroke of a brush, pushing the boundaries of possibility long before modern art embraced similar impulses. By celebrating these “hidden” treasures in a major museum context, the Royal Academy reaffirms Hugo’s significance not only as a colossus of literature but as a pioneering force in the visual arts—one whose bold experiments still captivate and inspire centuries later.
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
Wednesday 19 March 2025 – Sunday 29 June 2025
Tickets cost £17
