Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo

Moody, haunting and almost abstract, Hugo's drawings are a testament to his imagination and a touchstone for Romantics, Symbolists and Surrealists alike

Novelist, poet and politician Victor Hugo was a towering figure of 19th-century French society, both in the realm of politics and popular culture. His speeches, poems, prose and other writings became rallying points for the French Republic's ideals of equality and freedom. While living in exile from 1851 to 1870, he wrote some of his most famous works and simultaneously pursued his passion for drawing. Hugo created over 4,000 drawings during his lifetime, 3,000 of which survive today. His ink-and-wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters, tortured figures and seascapes may be less well known than his writings, but they inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets and several generations of artists up to the Surrealists of the 1920s; Vincent van Gogh once compared them to "astonishing things."
This richly illustrated book--published by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France--includes reproductions of many of Hugo's finest works on paper, from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and experiments in abstraction.
Born in Besançon, France, Victor Hugo (1802-85) wrote novels, plays, poetry, essays and more in a literary career spanning 60 years. In 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic, launching a tumultuous political career in which he advocated for an end to slavery, capital punishment and absolute monarchy. He is best known for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables.