‘In Guernsey, art is part of the conversation’

Inspiration is never far away in an enchanting place that has called to Renoir, Victor Hugo and a host of other creative people, finds Russell Higham

- Russell Higham

DURING Guernsey's five-year occupation in the Second World War, the British lieutenant-governor's residence in St Peter Port, Old Government House, was commandeered by the Nazis to serve first as a headquarters and then as a luxurious soldatenheim (barracks) for its troops. Now the island's only five-star hotel (www.theoghhotel.com), this opulent mansion overlooking the harbour contains the remnants of a library that held books Wehrmacht officers would read, lounging by the swimming pool where guests now sip cocktails.

Two of the volumes on its shelves today—which would have been strictly verboten to German soldiers—are by Victor Hugo. The author, political thinker and human-rights advocate lived in the Bailiwick of Guernsey from 1855–70, having been exiled from France for opposing Napoleon. It was at his Georgian home (now a museum: www.maisonsvictorhugo.paris.fr/guernesey) on Hauteville, a street a short walk from Old Government House, that he completed Les Misérables and wrote Toilers of the Sea, inspired by the turbulent waters of the Channel below.

The author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, often considered the French equivalent of Shakespeare, also temporarily turned his pen from writing to drawing there, making hundreds of sketches of Guernsey in scenes both real and imagined, dreamlike and nightmarish. Many of the works, which his contemporary Vincent van Gogh admired as 'astonishing things' (a phrase adopted for the title of a recent exhibition of Hugo's pictures at the Royal Academy, London W1; Arts & antiques, March 19), were made during a period of intense grief over the death by drowning of his daughter Léopoldine, aged only 19.