Wonderfully intimate: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, at the RA, reviewed

You feel so close to Victor Hugo in this exhibition. It’s as if you are at his elbow while he sighs at his standing desk at the top of his house on Guernsey, where he held France constantly in view as he worked. Here, frustrated by Les Misères (working title), he has thrown down his pen and moved to his art table, sloshing great washes of sepia ink across paper to form lowering clouds. And there, daydreaming, he has cut out a stencil of a castle, and placed it on a cloud of ink. (Hmm, ‘castle on a cloud’ – could make a nice lyric for a song one day…)

Here is a person thinking with their pen – or rather, letting their pen think with them

There is a wonderful intimacy to his travel sketchbooks, full of minutely well-observed brickwork and staircases. And also to his doodles, inkblots, taches (stains), his ghosties (made by printing with scraps of lace) and other high-spirited caricatures, created in the 1830s late at night while chatting and debating with friends. One recalled how Hugo placed these sketches ‘every evening on his children’s beds and which they find when they wake up in the morning, to their great joy’. Then there are his mysterious notebooks of wiggly lines, possibly a form of automatic drawing or shadow-tracing. By the time he made these, he had been living in exile on Guernsey for a decade, and he had started using séances to converse, via a Ouija board, with Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and even Death itself, which clearly marked an uptick to his social life.

Most of these works were never intended for display – too odd (that menacing mushroom!) – and were instead a distraction, a re-creation, a way back into his written work, a summoning of dramatic atmosphere, of mood, made, as Hugo said, ‘in the margins or on the covers of manuscripts during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen’.