Fuseli? Walpole? Hugo!
The drawings of Victor Hugo (1802–85), of which about 3,000 survive, mark the smouldering confluence of night scenes and night drawing. Hugo began making caricatures c.1830, then drew landscape views and architecture for his own amusement and as a kind of spiritual exercise. Technically daring and courting accident, they were made on his travels, at home with his wife and children, during seances, but mostly on the dining-room table of his lifelong lover, the actress Juliette Drouet, who followed him into exile in Jersey and Guernsey (1852–70). Only a handful of the seventy-seven drawings in an impressively lugubrious show at the Royal Academy look as though they were made during the day. They are early travel sketches, tremulously wiry architectural bits and bobs, gothicky but insufficiently picturesque to be “ye olde” or “pre-loved”. Daylight strips them down to “poor, bare, forked” things, vivisections revealing shameful dilapidation and structural nervous exhaustion. The author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was a pioneering advocate of preserving and restoring gothic buildings, but artistically he was half in love with their decline and death. ©
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