About This Image

Annotated 'Madame Victor Hugo' and numbered '18' in pencil on the mount recto. After his exile from France in 1852, Hugo and his close relatives settled on the Isle of Jersey in September, 1853. To pass the time, Charles Hugo and Auguste Vacquerie began to photograph family members and their surroundings, making over a hundred images between 1853 and 1854, which were collected into family albums. This image was a part of one of those albums.Provenance: family of Vacquerie-Lefevre.Auguste Vacquerie (1819-1895) was a French journalist, photographer and man of letters. Vacquerie was born at Villequier (Seine-Maritime) on November 19, 1819.He was from his earliest days an admirer of Victor Hugo, with whom he was connected by the marriage of his brother Charles with Léopoldine Hugo. His earlier romantic productions include a volume of poems, L'Enfer de l'esprit (1840); a translation of the Antigone (1844) in collaboration with Paul Meurice; and Tragaldabas (1848), a melodrama. He was one of the principal contributors to the journal L'Événement and followed Hugo into his exile in Jersey in 1852, where he took photographs of the Hugo family and relatives.He taught photography to Charles Hugo, the son of Victor.In 1869 he returned to Paris, and with Meurice and others founded the anti-imperial Rappel. His articles in this paper were more than once the occasion of legal proceedings. After 1870 he became editor of Rappel.His other works include Souvent homme varie (1859), a comedy in verse; Jean Baudry (1863), the most successful of his plays; Aujourd'hui et demain (1875); Futura (pub. 1900), and poems on philosophical and humanitarian subjects. He published a collected edition of his plays in 1879 and a collection of essays in 1885.Vacquerie died in Paris on February 19, 1895. In the year of his death, the rue Auguste-Vacquerie, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, was named in his honor.

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