Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
Auteur(s) : Collectif
Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, 21 March - 29 June 2025
Novelist, poet and politician, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is an iconic figure in nineteenth-century French public life. The author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame became a symbol of the French Republic's ideals of equality and freedom during his long exile in the Channel Islands.
In private, Hugo's refuge was drawing. His ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writings. Less well known, these works nevertheless inspired the Romantic and Symbolist poets, as well as many artists, including the Surrealists.
This catalogue of the exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France includes texts by leading Hugo specialists and reproductions of many of his finest works on paper, from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and experiments with abstraction.
