Victor HUGO - Original signed drawing. – Landscape at the Castle

Victor HUGO (1802.1885)

Original signed drawing. – Landscape at the Castle

Pencil, brown ink, wash, and heightened with white gouache, on strong paper.

Victor H. signature (hardly legible) on the lower right margin.

Size: 4 x 11 cm. Circa 1850.

Splendid drawing, precious provenances, 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:

  “Victor Hugo, if he were not a poet, would be a painter of the first order; he excels in mixing, in dark and wild fantasies, the chiaroscuro effects of Goya with the architectural terror of Piranesi; he knows how, in the middle of threatening shadows, to outline with a ray of the moon or a flash of lightning, the towers of a dismantled town and on a livid ray of the setting sun, to cut out in black the silhouette of a city distant with its series of needles, bell towers and belfries. Many decorators would envy him this strange quality of creating dungeons, old streets, castles, ruined churches; of an unusual style, of an unknown architecture, full of love and mystery, the appearance of which oppresses you like a nightmare. »

Exhibitions:

– Brussels, Ixelles Museum, Victor Hugo designer. No. 32, in the catalog. 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 designer. No. 32 in the catalog (page 56). 1999.

This work has been authenticated by Mr. Pierre Georgel and will be included in his catalog raisonné currently in preparation.