Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo

By Victor Hugo

"Novelist, poet, and politician Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a towering figure of 19th-century French society, both in the realm of politics (where he advocated for an end to slavery, capital punishment, and absolute monarchy) and literature (as the creator of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables). While living in exile from 1851 to 1870, he pursued an obsessive passion for spiritualism—and drawing. The results of this refuge into the visionary were shown almost exclusively to friends and family alone, without any attempt to address or please the art world. Hugo’s experimental approach to visual expression seems limitless. He splashed and blotted, used impressions of lace and leaves, coffee grounds or dust. He placed letters of the alphabet throughout his images like secret signs or signals. His conjured phantasms vacillate between the depiction of landscapes (trees, stones, clouds, seascapes), architecture (castles, bridges, spiders’ webs), and creatures (tortured figures, animals, hanged men)–—and alchemical renderings of abstract forms and stains. These strange works on paper—“made in the margins with what remained of the ink from my pen”— are the subject of Astonishing Things, published by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This is not the first book in English about Hugo’s enigmatic drawings, but it is a beaut and you should have it."
–Herbert Pföstl

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.

2025; hardcover; 9" x 10.6"; 172 pages; ISBN: 9781915815118.