A brush with greatness

Victor Hugo found solace in art, but dismissed his drawings as mere things made 'during hours of almost unconscious reverie'. Now, a Royal Academy exhibition reveals how powerfully they engage the imagination

- Carla Passino

A COLOSSAL toadstool towers above a drab landscape, at once ominous and lonely, its red cap the only hint of colour in a sea of brown, an almost human face peeking from its stem. It would look at home among Surrealist paintings, but this 1850 drawing pre-dates the movement by more than 50 years and wasn't even made by a professional artist: instead, it is the work of one of literature's giants, Victor Hugo. 'No one really knows what the meaning of this drawing could be, but it has a prophetic, apocalyptic feel about it,' says art historian and Royal Academy (RA) curator Sarah Lea.

Mushroom is one of some 70 works by the French author to go on display at the RA's 'Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo', which Ms Lea curated. 'It's a long overdue exhibition. The last major [one] in the UK was in 1974. [Hugo's] drawings are very rarely seen because they are extremely fragile to light exposure and, therefore, I don't think that many people here know this great titan of 19th-century literature was also a visual artist.'