24/4/23 - Acquisition - Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo - We presented them at the end of our anthology of the Talabardon & Gautier sales that SVV Ader was preparing to organise on 21 and 23 March (see news item of 19/3/23), the two unusual ink washes on fir boards by Victor Hugo (ill. 1 and 2) were preempted by the Maison de Victor Hugo. Sold for 192,000 euros (including fees), they were the most spectacular of the fourteen preemptions that punctuated the two auctions already widely reported on our pages. The two new panels, which had remained in private hands with the artist’s descendants until they were put up for sale in 2012 at the Hugo Collection sale organised by Christie’s in Paris, will be presented to the public on 10 May among the thirty or so works in the exhibition celebrating the 120th anniversary of the Place des Vosges museum.
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- 1. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Vivez
Pen and brown ink wash on a fir board
30 x 83 cm (complete panel: 48 x 101 x 2 cm)
Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo
Photo : Ader - See the image in its page
Almost identical in format, the two pendants are each made up of three joined boards held together by a wide fir border serving as a frame left unfinished. The compositions, executed in ink, depict, for one, a long banquet table on whose tablecloth is inscribed "Vivez" ("Live"), for the other, a tombstone engraved with the epitaph "Mourez" ("Die"). To the right of each of these settings is a well-known Hugolian character, "Goulatromba", a recurring figure in his writings from 1838 to 1875, as Vincent Wallez details in his study of the author’s dramatic fragments [Vincent Wallez, Des fragments dramatiques: re-de-composition, in Victor Hugo et la langue, proceedings of the colloquium held in 2002 at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy]. As Gérard Audinet points out [1] in his detailed notice, baptized in Act IV of Ruy Blas written between the 1st and 7th of August 1838 - "He is a very gentle man and of elegant life,/ A lord, from whom never a swear word fell,/And my friend of heart named - Goulatromba" -, this monstrous and grotesque figure, Don César de Bazan’s "friend of the court", was first represented graphically in a travel notebook - Rhine, Switzerland, Rhone Valley, Provence - of 1839.
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- 2. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Mourez
Pen and brown ink wash on a fir board - 28.5 x 82.5 cm (complete panel: 46 x 100 x 2 cm)
Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo
Photo : Ader - See the image in its page
If it is again declined in the carnet du voyage de 1840, its most complete version is given by an undated drawing (ill. 3), but undoubtedly later, from which the panel "Vivez" seems to be quite directly inspired. The sheet, preserved by the Maison de Victor Hugo, is captioned with three lines from Ruy Blas. The canine-faced figure is shown standing at the right of a table laden with bottles, a jug and glasses. With a sword at his side and a large hat from which a long feather hangs, he evokes another character described by Don César de Bazan a few verses earlier in Act IV: "At his side, you will see a fat devil with a red nose,/Haired up to his eyebrows with an old faded felt/where a dismayed feather duster hangs tragically/The rapier at his back and the rag at his shoulder".
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- 3. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Goulatromba
Plume et lavis d’encre sur carton - 14.4 x 20.5 cm
Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo
Photo : Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo - See the image in its page
Still according to Gérard Audinet, an important detail about this leaf needs to be clarified as it may guide the interpretation of the two newly acquired panels. On two preserved fragments of the original mounting on the reverse of the frame of the drawing are several inscriptions, one of which refers to Leopoldine’s communion and another to the title "Goulatromba" and the owner "Auguste Vacquerie". Although it is known that this drawing belonged to Léopoldine and passed, after her premature death, to Auguste Vacquerie, her brother-in-law, it cannot be dated to Léopoldine’s communion, celebrated on 8 September 1836, i.e. almost two years before the verses evoking Goulatromba, in Act IV of Ruy Blas. The inscription would more likely have been made on the occasion of Léopoldine’s wedding on 15 February 1843 and the drawing could have been given to her on that occasion. If so, Goulatromba would be linked to the memory, still painful for Victor Hugo, of his daughter’s marriage and death a few months later, in September 1843. In this sense, a second link with Léopoldine could be perceived in the panel "Mourez". The tombstone depicted there is reminiscent of the one in drawing France - preserved by the Maison de Victor Hugo - given to Paul Meurice to serve as the frontispiece to volume 1 of his copy of Contemplations. Like the tomb of "France", the tomb of "Mourez" could be seen as that of Léopoldine to whom the last poem of the collection, À celle qui est restée en France, is dedicated.
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- 4. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Trumeau with mirror and landscape, painted frame, 1856-1857
Ink and wood
Panel - 12 x 82 cm
Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo
Photo : Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo - See the image in its page
As for the purpose of these panels, while it is difficult to prove the family legend that they were extensions for the dining room table at Hauteville House - they follow the otherwise recurring theme of its décor designed around the cycle of life and death but do not have dimensions compatible with those of the table - they are nonetheless attached to the Guernsey home. As Gérard Audinet points out, the fir wood of the panels - of which only Mourez bears the partially erased date "185?" - could come from the wood of the crates that packed the furniture and objects - saved from the sale of the furniture of the flat in the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne in June 1852 - that Victor Hugo had brought from Paris in 1856 to furnish and decorate his new house. It is indeed attested that he reused the wood of the boxes to partition certain walls or to plank certain walls before fixing the woodwork of the decorations, just as he drew on certain boards, several of which are preserved at Hauteville House, sketches of the layout.
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- 5. Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Burg
Ink on panel - 67 x 60.2 cm
Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo
Photo : Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo - See the image in its page
A great experimenter with processes, he may then have felt the desire to draw on these salvaged boards. Only a very limited corpus seems to be able to attest to this. In addition to the two preempted panels, two panels integrated into painted frames to form overmantels have survived - Landscape with a burg (ill. 4), dated 1856, for the overmantel of the dining room of La Fallue, Juliette Drouet’s house in Hauteville, and the figure integrated into the overmantel in the Jean-Jacques Lebel collection, the only work of this type preserved outside the collections of the House of Victor Hugo - and the undated Burg (ill. 5), found at Hauteville House, drawn on three boards assembled vertically. The latter seems to follow a different logic, a motif inspired by the stain probably left by an overturned ink bottle, which is reminiscent of the artist’s famous "planetary stains", a first example of which recently reached the Musée de la Place des Vosges (see article). To this small corpus of five drawings on panels should be added the series of painted frames created by Victor Hugo from the overmantel of the above-mentioned La Fallue in 1857 to the monumental frame of Burg à la croix in 1871.