An Amusement Between Verses – the Art of Victor Hugo

Town with tumbledown bridge, 1847; pen, brown-ink wash, black crayon, watercolour and stencil on vellum paper, partly scraped (137 x 209 mm)In France, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is by some considered the greatest French poet. To the rest of the world, he is most well-known for his novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But he was in fact also a great artist. It was many years ago now that I discovered this by chance: I was in a suburban department store, accompanying my sister while she shopped, and picked up a catalogue of his works on paper in the books department. I had never seen his drawings, and he was an equally serendipitous discovery for my then-boyfriend, who was not only an artist himself, but a collector. We were both thrilled by the delicate beauty and sheer breadth of Hugo’s graphic work (numbering nearly 3000 items).

The book, Shadows of a Hand – The Drawings of Victor Hugo, accompanied an exhibition of the same name that was held at The Drawing Centre, New York, from April 16–June 13, 1998.

Hugo worked mainly in ink, but he was known to import all sorts of bizarre matter into his drawings. Often he employed many mediums at once, and rubbed and scraped back the surface. The resulting drawings have an exciting texture and depth. Hugo writes to Baudelaire, on April 29, 1860:

“I’m very happy and very proud that you should choose to think kindly of what I call my pen-and-ink drawings. I’ve ended up mixing in pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal dust, soot and all sorts of bizarre concoctions which manage to convey more or less what I have in view, and above all in mind. It keeps me amused between two verses.”

Castle lit up in the night, 1856; pen, brown-ink wash and black ink over rubbed charcoal on laid paper (138 x 188 mm)Hugo’s drawing techniques were extremely unusual. One of the fullest accounts is by his son, Charles Hugo:

“Once paper, pen and ink-well have been brought to the table, Victor Hugo sits down and without making a preliminary sketch, without any apparent preconception, sets about drawing with an extraordinarily sure hand not the landscape as a whole but any old detail. He will begin his forest with the branch of a tree, his town with a gable, his gable with a weather vane, and, little by little, the entire composition will emerge from the blank paper with the precision and clarity of a photographic negative subjected to the chemical preparation that brings out the picture. That done, the draftsman will ask for a cup and will finish off his landscape with a light shower of black coffee. The result is an unexpected and powerful drawing that is often strange, always personal, and recalls the etchings of Rembrandt and Piranesi.”

I find his drawings so atmospheric they also bring to mind the painter William Turner.

Sunset by the sea, c. 1852–55; grey-ink wash and stencil on grey-tinted paper (86 x 231 mm)Cloud over a field, c. 1854–56?; brush and brown-ink wash on beige paper (215 x 284 mm)Steeple taches, c. 1856?; Brown- and blue-ink wash with highlights of white gouache on beige paper (80 x 80 mm)Apart from ink washes, Hugo also experimented with ink taches (ink blots which are manipulated with excess water, smearing and smudging); pliages (symmetrical taches, formed by folding the paper); lace impressions (applying ink-soaked lace –often metallic, ie, wired – to paper); and stencils and cut-outs (combined with other drawing techniques and mediums).

Chandelier, c. 1850; pen and brown-ink wash on a verso of a letter folded down the middle (262 x 205 mm)Heraldic eagle, c. 1855; cut-out made from black, laid paper and mounted on vellum (195 x 133 mm)Study for an eagle for a coat of arms, c. 1855; soft charcoal, stencil, pen, brown-ink wash, black ink, blue ink and application of lace on vellum paper (297 x 229 mm)

”… little by little, the entire composition will emerge from the blank paper with the precision and clarity of a photographic negative …”
– Charles Hugo

Also a statesman and human rights activist, Hugo was exiled in 1851, after declaring Napoleon III a traitor to France. Much of Hugo’s work that he produced after this time is ‘distinguished either by their large formats, or by the use of mixed media in which reliance of chance is increasingly frequent’. His new trust in the occult lead to experimental ‘spirit-drawings’ made with table-turning, but other themes included the ocean; space, and the unkown; and dream-like, elusive reveries on nature.

It was difficult to choose my favourites from the book, but here is a small selection from some of these categories. Scroll down for more, and be inspired. (Click images for larger versions.)

Lace impressions, c. late 1855; two lace impressions in a single frame: (left) application of lace soaked in brown ink, rubbed charcoal and highlights of brown ink on cream paper (220 x 95 mm), (right) application of lace soaked in brown-ink wash, on blue paper (280 x 105 mm)’Old city‘ calling card, 1856; pen, brown-ink wash, applications of lace soaked in brown and black ink wash with highlights of red and gold gouache on bluish laid paperMushroom, c. 1850; pen, brown-ink wash, black ink, black crayon, charcoal, gouache, watercolour, fingerprints, reserves and stencil on paper, partly scraped and rubbed (474 x 608 mm)Renaissance architecture; Pen, brown-ink wash, black ink, gouache, graphite, black crayon, fingerprints and stencils (?) on vellum paper, partly rubbed (208 x 244 mm)Ruined aqueduct, c 1850; pen, brown-ink wash, black ink, graphite, black crayon, fingerprints and reserves on beige, gilt-edged vellum paper, partly rubbed [taches on verso], (249 x 329 mm)