Victor Hugo – Original signed drawing. – Landscape with a Castle
A splendid drawing suggesting a castle lost in the distance of a ghostly landscape.
Sold
A splendid drawing suggesting a castle lost in the distance of a ghostly landscape.
Sold
Victor Hugo (1802.1885)
Original signed drawing. – Landscape with Castle
Pencil, brown ink, wash, and highlights of white gouache, on heavy paper.
Signature Victor H. (barely legible) in the lower right margin.
Size: 4 x 11 cm. Circa 1850.
Splendid drawing, of precious provenance, suggesting a castle lost in the distance of a ghostly landscape.
Victor Hugo's graphic work testifies to his protean genius and leaves the viewer stunned and admiring, as Théophile Gautier wrote in 1862:
“If Victor Hugo were not a poet, he would be a first-rate painter; he excels at blending, in dark and fierce fantasies, the chiaroscuro effects of Goya with the architectural terror of Piranesi; he knows how to sketch, amidst menacing shadows, with a moonbeam or a flash of lightning, the towers of a ruined castle, and, against a livid ray of setting sun, to outline in black the silhouette of a distant city with its series of spires, bell towers, and belfries. Many decorators would envy him this strange ability to create dungeons, old streets, castles, ruined churches; in an unusual style, with an unknown architecture, full of love and mystery, whose appearance oppresses you like a nightmare.”
Exhibitions:
– Brussels, Ixelles Museum, Victor Hugo the draftsman. No. 32, in the catalogue. 1999.
– Bad Homburg, Sinclair-Haus, Schichten der Night. Arnulf Rainer – Victor Hugo , n°115 in the catalogue. 2001.
– Weimar, Schiller Museum, Victor Hugo – Visionen eines Schriftstellers , n°29 in the catalogue. 2008.
Origin :
– Juliette DROUET, then Louis Koch, her nephew, by descent.
– Hauswedel & Nolte sale, Hamburg, June 12, 1992, lot 379.
– Jan and Marie-Anne KRUGIER Collection.
– Sotheby's sale, London, July 9, 2014, lot 150.
Literature:
– The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection . 1999. Illustrated page 404.
– Victor Hugo the draftsman. No. 32 in the catalogue (page 56). 1999.
This work has been authenticated by Mr. Pierre Georgel and will be included in his catalogue raisonné currently in preparation.