[ID: 16 photos taken in an art gallery of pieces of art by Victor Hugo.
Image 1:
Black text on a grey background (a gallery wall), introducing the exhibition. The text reads:
THE DRAWINGS OF VICTOR HUGO
These things people insist on calling my drawings... made in the margins or on the covers of manuscripts during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen. - Victor Hugo, 1863
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a poet, playwright, novelist and politician of extraordinary global fame in the 19th century. Hugo began his career as a royalist, but from 1851 onwards - during a near twenty-year exile on the Channel Islands in opposition to Napoléon III - he came to represent the ideals of the French republic. His life was full of contradictions and personal tragedies, and yet many of his ideas endured: he imagined a 'United States of Europe', campaigned for the abolition of slavery and against capital punishment, and advocated to preserve historic architecture.
In 1890, Vincent van Gogh compared Victor Hugo's works to 'astonishing things'. It is uncertain whether he had in mind Hugo's drawings - first exhibited in Paris in 1888, three years after their creator's death - or passages from his novels such as Les Misérables (1862), which Van Gogh read avidly, and whose characters had become part of the cultural landscape. The two never met, but shared ideas about creative kinship across times and disciplines. For them both, writing and drawing were parallel creative processes that enriched one another.
Gathered in this exhibition are 70 of the more than 4,000 drawings Hugo is known to have made; those that survive are now so fragile to light that they are scarcely exhibited. This exhibition is principally drawn from the important collections of the Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernsey and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
Direct connections to his literary works are rare, most of Hugo's beguiling drawings are not illustrations but deeply personal, exploratory visions. He often gave these works to close friends and family, although a small number were known more widely via published prints. Hugo's public writings and private drawings drew upon shared metaphorical frameworks in his imagination, rooted in grand themes of nature, history and time, and expressed through motifs such as mountains, castles and ruins.
A chronology of Hugo's life is available in the gallery guide.
Image 2:
A small rectangular portrait painting in a white card frame, hung in a light wooden frame on a gallery wall. The painting is in ink and features a small building and trees in the centre right, with HUGO running across the foreground of the image. In the top left corner, there is a print made with lace. Hugo has written the words 'Guernsey - janvier' and '1856' in the bottom left corner. The ink is a dark brown/black, with a dark ink wash in the top right corner. There are splashes of red ink on the letters 'H' and 'G' of 'HUGO'.
Image 3:
A small rectangular portrait painting in a white card frame, hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. The painting is in dark brown/black ink and features a castle-like building set against a stormy sky, with two flights of stairs leading up to it. On either side of the stairs, the letters 'V' and 'H' stand out in light grey against a much darker background. There is a wash of bright blue running across the back of the painting - the sea glimpsed through the castle.
Image 4:
A medium sized rectangular portrait image in a white card frame, hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. From the bottom left of the artwork diagonally across to the centre of the image is a grey/black cloud of smudged charcoal. In the centre is a small grey globe with a darker circle inside it, in which there is a tiny circle of white - a planet.
Image 5:
Two rectangular landscape pieces of art, one above the other, set in a white card frame. The top image features a light grey ink wash on the right and, on the left, layers of black ink that resemble the silhouette of a person with winds extended from their shoulders. The bottom image features two large areas of grey and black ink, with ink splatters around them.
Image 6:
A medium sized portrait painting in ink, set into a white card frame. Most of the painting is a dark brown/black ink wash that gives the impression that the viewer is in a deep structure with a curved wall, like a well. There is a semi-circle of lighter paper at the top of the image, where Hugo has used his fingerprints to make printed ovals, which resemble human faces looking into the well.
Image 7:
A relatively large rectangular landscape painting in ink, set into a white card frame and hung on the gallery wall in a dark brown wooden frame. The background of the painting is a brown ink wash, varying from a mid-tone brown on the left to a lighter creamy brown on the right. The left side of the painting is a fortress-like castle in brown ink in the distance, quite abstract and rough looking, rather than a precise and detailed architectural drawing. Across the bottom of the painting, running up the right side in the foreground, is a winding trail of leaves and flowers in different shades of green, white, blue, and red. In the right bottom corner of the painting, they surround the depiction of a carved stone statue of an angel in brown ink, its wings close to its body and its head turned toward the bottom right of the painting.
Image 8:
A medium sized landscape painting in ink, set into a white card frame and hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. Most of the painting is a dark brown ink wash. On the diagonal in the centre, running from left to right away from the viewer, is a stone causeway in a lighter brown ink, with black line details.
Image 9:
A large portrait painting in ink, set in a white card frame and hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. The painting is of a lighthouse in Guernsey set against stormy seas and skies. The backdrop of the painting is a very dark grey/black, with the silhouette of a ship's mast in the bottom right, against a lighter back of sky. The lighthouse takes up most of the image, the light brown stone steps rising up to a very bright white light at the top of the painting. The lighthouse light is shrouded in dark grey clouds.
Image 10:
A large rectangular landscape painting in ink, set in a white card frame and hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. The entire image is a dark brown/black ink wash, through which it is possible to make out the twisting black body of a serpent-like creature. In the right of the painting, its jaws are opened wide, with bright red emanating from its mouth.
Image 11:
A large rectangular landscape painting in ink, set into a grey card frame and hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. The painting features a gigantic mushroom against an apolcalyptic backdrop of a skeletal landscape in both dark and light brown ink. The mushroom leans away from the viewer, its stalk starting cream with black details at the bottom and then featuring bright blue and red patches, as well as darker brown ink, at the top of the stem. The underside of the top of the mushroom is a mixture of grey and blue ink, and the top of it is a halo of pale red around it.
Image 12:
A medium sized rectangular portrait painting in ink, set in a white card frame and hung in a dark brown wooden frame on a gallery wall. The majority of the painting is a grey/black ink wash, moving in an ombre style from very dark at the bottom to a lighter grey at the top. In the centre of the painting is a lighter depiction of a dead man who has been hanged, as well as the scaffold from which he hangs.
Image 13:
A relatively small rectangular potrait painting in ink, set in a white card frame. The image features an outstretched hand and arm, reaching toward the top of the painting, the palm partially facing the side and partially toward the viewer. A white sleeve falls back from the wrist to where the arm is cut off at the elbow. The arm and hand are in black ink, with a dark brown ink wash behind. Hugo has written the words 'LE RÉVE' at the bottom.
Image 14:
A medium sized landscape painting in ink, set in a white card frame and hung in a dark brown wooden frame on a gallery wall. The painting features a small black spider on a circular spider's web. The web stretches across the border of the painting, which depicts a structure made from wood or stone. The structure is painted in different shades of brown. The spider's web is drawn in very fine black lines. The spider faces away from the viewer. The background is a pale sky, with a patch of bright blue in the top left corner.
Image 15:
A small square mirror hung on a gallery wall. The mirror itself is a small rectangle set into a large wooden frame. The mirror is patchy and warped with age. There is a red border around the mirror, with gold leaves painted on it. The wide wooden frame has also been painted on; it features a variety of birds, butterflies, flowers, vines, and leaves in different shades of white, red, blue, brown, and green. Hugo has written in French in black ink beneath the mirror and on the bottom left corner of the frame.
Image 16:
A relatively large rectangular portrait painting in ink. The painting is set in a white frame and hung in a dark wooden frame on a gallery wall. The painting features an octopus in dark brown ink. The octopus's head is in the centre of the painting, facing the viewer with its two eyes on either side and dark speckly spots over its head, and its tentacles extend outward in all directions, waving, looping, and curling in a flowing style. The tentacles feature details of its suckers in places. The bottom of the painting is a dark brown/black ink wash, and the background is painted in lighter brown patches in a watercolour style.
