Artist

(b. 1802, Besançon, d. 1885, Paris)

---

Details

French poet, novelist, dramatist and draughtsman. He was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). After training as a lawyer, Hugo embarked on the literary career and assembled a massive body of work while living in Paris, Brussels and the Channel Islands. Victor Hugo was also an accomplished and prolific draughtsman. He produced nearly three thousand drawings, the principal groups of which are today in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris. He began to draw seriously around 1825, but relatively little of this early work survives and it was not until some twenty years later that he was to develop his distinctive personal idiom. Hugo seems to have been most productive as a draughtsman during periods when he was writing less, as for example in 1850. His drawings achieved a height of expression during the years of his political exile from France on the Channel Islands of Jersey, where he and his family lived from 1852 to 1855, and Guernsey, where he settled in 1855 and remained until 1870. Although he often gave drawings as presents to friends and colleagues, and allowed several sheets to be reproduced as engravings, the act of drawing for Hugo remained a largely private occupation. In the last ten years of his life, he drew much less, a decline mirrored in his literary output. As a draughtsman, Hugo relied primarily on brown or black ink and wash, applied with a fluidity and transparency that allowed for remarkable tonal and atmospheric effects. Hugo died in Paris on the 23 of May, 1885 at the age of 83. His state funeral was attended by nearly two million people. It took ten thousand police control the crowds. On the first of June, Hugo was laid to rest in the Panthenon alongside Rousseau and Voltaire. //

---

Category	Artists
Artists by letter	H
Artist nationality	French