Victor Hugo’s drawings are to go on a very rare public display at the Royal Academy in London.
Over 70 artworks by the famous French figure will feature in the exhibition — and they’ve not been seen in Britain for 50 years.
The show promises to be a comprehensive survey of the works on paper created by the renowned politician and author of iconic books Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Yes, Victor Hugo was actually a visual artist alongside being a writer. Who knew?!
It turns out he took refuge in drawing during his twenty-year exile in the Channel Islands in the mid-19th century.
Visitors to the art exhibition will be able to get up close to his full range of output on paper — from early caricatures and travel drawings, to dramatic landscapes and experiments with abstraction.
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The items will be coming to London on loan from important collections from across Europe. It’s a partnership between Britain and France, as it’s been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Paris Musées — Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Who was Victor Hugo?
Hugo is one of France’s most famous writers and remains so to this day. But he was much more than. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and even a statesman. His work captured the struggles of the poor, the pressure of injustice, and the turmoil of revolution.
Hugo was exiled in 1851 because he opposed Napoleon III’s seizure of power. Initially a supporter of the Republic, Hugo turned against the future Emperor when he staged a coup and declared himself absolute ruler of France. Hugo denounced him as a dictator.
Fearing arrest, Hugo fled, eventually settling in Belgium, then Jersey, and later Guernsey, where he remained for two decades. During this exile he continued to write, gaining influence as both a literary and political figure. His writings symbolised the ideals of the French Republic such as equality and freedom.
But it was also in this exile where he flourished as a visual artist. He produced ink visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes that can be seen as just as poetic as his writing. Yet these images were rarely seen in public in his lifetime.
When Victor Hugo died in 1885, aged 83, over two million people lined the streets of Paris to see his funeral procession.
Why is the exhibition called Astonishing Things?
Hugo’s art and writing went on to inspire Symbolist poets, and many artists, from Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, to contemporary artists such as Raymond Pettibon and Antony Gormley RA.
However, it's fellow prolific drawer Vincent van Gogh who was perhaps Hugo’s most famous admirer. In letters to his brother Theo, van Gogh compared Hugo’s artwork to “astonishing things.”
What’s in the Victor Hugo exhibition?
The Royal Academy has arranged the show thematically, and in four sections.
The exhibition opens with a section entitled Writing and Drawing, addressing the relationship between Hugo’s artistic and literary works. These were parallel creative tracks for Hugo — he would write for the public but draw as a private activity only for family and close friends. Here visitors will see works with motifs such as ruins and mountains.
The second section is called Observation and Imagination, and focuses on the artist’s drawing process, representing a variety of materials — from fine pencil to wet inks. On view will be Hugo’s painstakingly crafted drawings of landscapes and buildings, observed from life. It will spotlight how figuration and abstraction are in constant flux in his output.
The third section — Fantasy and Reality — will explore Hugo’s most abiding obsession: castles.
Hugo drew castles that ranged in tone from romantic and sometimes colourful, to hauntingly bleak. This section will also explore Hugo’s interactions with printmaking. On display will be a 1m-wide print by French engraver Fortuné-Louis Méaulle and dated 1875, that recreates Hugo’s most ambitious drawing, 1850’s The Castle with the Cross.
The final section will look at Hugo’s most recurring motif: the ocean. It will feature photographs of Hugo by his sons, Charles and François-Victor, taken on the beach in Jersey. This section will also include drawings relating to Les Misérables, and some of Hugo’s largest works, such as The Lighthouse at Casquets, Guernsey 1866.
How much are Victor Hugo exhibition tickets?
Tickets for Astonishing Things are available to pre-book now. Adult tickets are available from £15 or £17 with a recommended donation. Concessions available, and under 16s go free and Friends of the RA go free.
If you want to go even deeper into Victor Hugo's drawings — or research them before you visit — you can grab the accompanying illustrated catalogue. It includes contributions by experts including Gérard Audinet, Director of Maisons de Victor Hugo and Thomas Cazentre, Curator at the Bibliothèque nationale de France as well as reproductions of the Hugo's finest works. And with the drawings only going on show every half-century, the Astonishing Things book* might be the only chance to you get to see them again.
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo opens at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 21 March and runs until 29 June 2025.
*Purchasing the exhibition book through this link funds this website at no extra cost to you