Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo – a 'haunting' exhibition

Victor Hugo was "the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. We've all absorbed the myths he created – "Les Misérables", "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" – "even if we have never picked up one of his books". Still, it may come as a surprise to learn that beyond his talents as a novelist, he was also an accomplished visual artist.

Although entirely self-taught, Hugo (1802-1885) was a prolific draughtsman, reeling off thousands of sketches – from idle "caricatures" to "sublime and surreal masterpieces" – "without rules or any audience except himself"; indeed, he never exhibited them in public in his lifetime. This "sensitively curated" new exhibition is a rare opportunity to see his art, featuring around 70 drawings that offer a revelatory glimpse into his private world. Sometimes tiny in scale, the works here depict everything from "fairy-tale castles" and "unreal landscapes" to "cosmic visions of planets". Hugo self-deprecatingly described his approach to drawing as "using up spare ink" – but at its best, his art is "haunting" and "timeless".

Throughout, "you feel immersed in a phantasmagoria of crumbling edifices and fog-shrouded gothic remnants", said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. The brown-washed, almost sepia-tinged drawings frequently evoke the "twilit nostalgic sensibility" of Hugo's novels, some deploying odd tricks of perspective to eerie effect. One stunning example sees the fortress town of Vianden in Luxembourg glimpsed through a spider's web, the "giant arachnid" seemingly hovering over the "minuscule" town in the distance. In another image "uncannily anticipating nuclear apocalypse", he depicts an "enormous green and red" mushroom rising above a destroyed landscape. Experiments with collage, meanwhile – a postage stamp glued onto another view of a castle, say, or lace incorporated into a depiction of a "winding stair" – seem to prefigure the 20th century avant-garde.

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The mood here is generally "dark and oppressive", said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. For example, we see a "vast subterranean skull" growing from the roots of a tree "like a malignant tuber". Another drawing, in which Hugo exhibits his opposition to capital punishment, shows a cadaver hanging from a gibbet; its title – "Ecce Lex" (1854) – means "Behold the law". Everything here has "a mesmerising peculiarity, like half-glimpsed visions of alternative dimensions" – perhaps derived from his interest in "automatic" drawing, whereby he allowed his unconscious to tease "strange forms" from "random inkblots". Witness his picture of an octopus performing "otherworldly semaphore with improbably knotted tentacles". You might not wish to be "trapped" inside the great author's "psychedelic" imagination for too long, but this exhibition is "a wild ride".

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 29 June