Art review Murky masterpieces reveal Victor Hugo's huge heart

Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo Royal Academy, London

- Jonathan Jones

Victor Hugo is the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens. The inventor of Quasimodo and Jean Valjean is so universal that we absorb his myths even if we have never read him.

Yet how much do most of us know about Hugo himself? By dedicating an exhibition to this versatile creator's visual art, which started with caricatures and developed into surreal masterpieces, the Royal Academy does something unexpectedly moving. It shows his secret heart.

For instance Hugo's feelings about the death penalty are clear. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a macabre inky portrait of a hanged corpse, part of his doomed campaign to save a murderer called John Tapner.

A few years later Hugo gave permission for this drawing to be made into a print protesting the execution of the American anti-slavery activist John Brown.

If there was a liberal cause, Hugo threw his huge heart into it.