Victor Hugo. The drawings

It should be explored whenever the occasion arises, since the frailty of the drawings makes viewing opportunities increasingly rare. Featuring renowned masterpieces from the collection together with illustrations well worth rediscovering, the exhibition aims to take the visitor into the very core of the creative legacy that Victor Hugo kept, like a secret garden, for the intimate circle of family, friends, and himself.

A solitary and a quasi-self-taught artist, Victor Hugo nonetheless kept a keen eye on some of the Romantic painters with whom he was acquainted, such as Celestin Nanteuil, especially in his early years. He also interacted with engravers who, during his lifetime, disseminated his drawings in a sometimes spectacular way. He also confronted himself, divided between the sublime and the grotesque, between contemplation of nature and moral or political satire, which were the two facets of his mind and alternate throughout his life, tracing a dividing line between landscapes and caricatures.

His work also expresses the complicity he shared with Juliette Drouet, at whose house he completed his best drawings in 1850 and who was often his first spectator and first collector.