Astonishing Things

The Drawings of Victor Hugo

Sarah Lea author Rose Thompson author Gérard Audinet author Thomas Cazentre author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Royal Academy of Arts

Publishing:10th Mar '25

£35.00

This title is due to be published on 10th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Astonishing Things cover

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.

ISBN: 9781915815118

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

176 pages