Victor Hugo, liberated creativity

Victor Hugo’s drawings are an inexhaustible source of insight into his creativity and approach. “He was a painter before he was a writer,” asserted Théophile Gautier, the first to remark that Victor Hugo’s sensitivity was above all visual. Looking at some of his most well known drawings gives an insight into the process whereby his writing drew upon this sensitivity for endless exchanges between word and image. The key moment occurred in 1856 when the Dessins Fantasques revealed Victor Hugo’s identity crisis. Elaborating on Marion Milner’s research work, the author attempts to understand Hugo’s search for his identity, thereby shedding light on the creative spark, not to mention the exceptional fusion between writing and drawing in Les Travailleurs de la Mer.