Full Description
The novelist, poet and politician, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a towering figure in French 19th-century 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. His ink-and-wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes may be less well known than his writings, but they inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists, including the Surrealists; Vincent van Gogh compared them to 'astonishing things'.
This handsome book - the catalogue of an exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Paris Musées - Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France - includes new texts by leading authorities on Hugo and reproductions of many of his finest works on paper, from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and experiments in abstraction.
Contents
President's Foreword 7
Acknowledgements 8
Double Vision: Victor Hugo's Mind's Eye 12
SARAH LEA
How a Poet Becomes a Painter 30
GÉRARD AUDINET
Architecture in the Drawings of Victor Hugo 40
THOMAS CAZENTRE
Catalogue Plates
WITH SECTION INTRODUCTIONS BY ROSE THOMPSON
Writing and Drawing 50
Observation and Imagination 66
Fantasy and Reality 102
Ocean 128
Chronology 150
ROSE THOMPSON
Notes 160
Selected Bibliography 164
Lenders to the Exhibition 166
Photographic Acknowledgements 166
Index 167
