Intuitive painter, groundbreaking and visionary

Because of their fragility, little are displayed. They did it for the first time in the Georges Petit gallery in Paris in 1888. They represent what he sees and what he imagines. They are stormy, twilight. Visionaries Obsessive Poetics He makes them with Chinese techniques, vinela paper, pen, brown ink, pencil and rubber; and even dust, coffee, smoke, Mora and Betún juice of Judea. Most are black and white and some, in color. There are little and also large. It begins in the 1830s, with cartoons for family and acquaintances. He paints the landscapes of his walks with the Nanteuil Carestin painter, initiatory teacher and friend. He makes them on the margins of letters and newspapers and about their own calligraphy, as in ‘El Mouse’ (1840); And in the books he dedicates, as in ‘The songs of streets and forests’ (1865) for his friend Paul Meurice.

As the technique dominates, he experiences with materials. “I have ended up mixing the pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal, soot and all kinds of rare mixtures that express a little better what I carry in my eyes and especially in my head.” It makes documentary and also introspective sketches. Mixture reality and fiction in fantasies such as ‘mushroom’ (1850), which imprisons a human face in the stem, and ‘planet-noon’ (1854), which synthesizes both elements in one. And it displays the passion for Gothic architecture, which falls in love with touring Europe, in stunning scenes such as ‘El Alegre Castillo’ (1847), ‘Matinal Bruma on the Rin’ (1850), ‘Silhouette of Castillo with three towers’ (1856), ‘Landscape with a castle in a cliff’ (1857) and ‘Fortaleza and Castillo de Vianden in the Light of the Moon’ (1871).

Born in Besanzón, in the hangover of the French Revolution. His mother is monarchical; His father, a general at the service of Napoleon Bonaparte. Study philosophy in Paris. With twenty years, Louis XVIII gives him an annual pension for the success of his first poems and appoints him gentleman of the Legion of Honor. The boom and fall of Napoleon III lives: the Julio Monarchy, the Revolution of 1848, the Second Republic and the Second Empire. Those events mold their life, thought and ideology. Buy its conservative roots. It justifies it in ‘The contemplations II’ (1856) with an imaginary mapping with a marquis friend of her family who reproaches her drifting. “What have you been doing since those happy days of your monarchical adolescence?” “I have grown,” he replies.

They lose their skirts. He married in 1822 with Adèle Fucher. They have five children: Léopold, Léopoldine, Charles, François-Victor and Adèle. The first four die and the fifth ends up in a psychiatric. Although it never divorces, it drags a list of adventures worthy of the best folletin. In 1845 they are surprised with Léonie Thévenot d’Antnet, wife of François-Auguste Biard, which they arrest when adultery is prohibited; He gets rid of being a couple of France and maintaining scarce in an exclusive enclosure for them. He has another mess with the Sarah Bernhardt diva and, with 76 years, he was infatuated with the twenty -year -old Blanche Lanvin, the daughter of some friends who is at her service. He had a wife and many lovers. They all knew the existence of the others. And they knew who was the favorite.

Duel and spiritualism

The family assumes that Juliette Drouet is the love of her life. It is one more in the house of the Plaza de los Vosos de Paris that inhabit between 1832 and 1848. With it it was exiled in 1851, after publicly opposing Napoleon III. They live in Brussels in 1852. Then on the island of Jersey, in Saint Helier, where he tries to overcome the death of their children Charles and Léopoldine with spiritualism. Organizes evenings to talk to them with the ‘speakers’ method that leads to the island Delphine writer of Girardin. The practice consisted of pronouncing the alphabet, waiting for the table to move and point out every letter of the message of the spirit. Hugo also claimed to speak with Plato, Galileo, Molière, Jesus Christ, poetry and death itself. He tells in ‘What the speakers say’, published after his death. Draw images such as ‘Stain of ink retouched on folding paper’ (1850), in which some see the exquisite body game that will make fashionable the surrealists of the twentieth century: a paper was painted randomly, folded and passed to the companions, which successively repeated the operation.

He lives the last years of exile on Guerensey Island. It is installed in 1855 in the port of San Pedro, in the Hauteville house that personally decorates: design furniture, frame frames, mirrors and floral panels. Splashes on the walls his initials in golden relief, crowns the fireplace with a large ax of tile. Plan to place each of your engravings. Enable a viewpoint in the attic to contemplate the sea. He writes ‘Los Miserables’ (1862), a novel that inspires the drawings ‘Cadena’ (1864), which in a later version will be recorded the title of the novel, and ‘The entrails of the Leviathan’ (1866). Exceptionally, create illustrations for ‘sea workers’ (1866). The title ‘Octopo’, ‘The ship lasts after sinking’, ‘The ship vision or the last fight’, ‘Gilliatt in the Great Douvre,’ Barco without Candles’ and ‘The Lighthouse of Casquets’. He incorporates them into the original, where he writes: «I dedicate this book to the rock of hospitality and freedom, to that portion of the old Norman land inhabited by the nobley island nation of the sea, to the island of Guernsey, hard but friendly, my current retreat, perhaps my grave». It won’t be. With the third republic, he returns to France. “In the stations they stopped the train, they recognized me almost everywhere, and shouted: ‘Viva Victor Hugo!’” He arrives on September 2, 1870 to the Gare du Nord of Paris. There he dies in 1885. Two million people roll their coffin. They watch it with honors day and night in the Arch of Triumph.