Louis Boulanger, Peintre Rêveur

Exhibition at the Maison Victor Hugo, Paris, 10 November 2022 - 5 March 2023

Louis Boulanger (1806-1867) was the closest of all the painters in the Romantic circle to Victor Hugo. But his friendships with a number of writers, including Alexandre Dumas and Balzac, and with painters such as the Devéria brothers and Eugène Giraud made him a central figure of the period.

With the great success he achieved at the 1827 Salon, Boulanger became one of the focal points of his generation. His diverse work - painting, lithography, costume designs for the theatre, illustration, set design - reveals him to be one of the main inventors of Romanticism, exploring the whole spectrum from frenetic and violent visions to lighter literary subjects.

This catalogue of the monographic exhibition devoted to Louis Boulanger by the Maison Victor Hugo, which holds more than 190 works by the artist, offers a well-developed and well-founded biographical chronology, enabling a better understanding of this remarkable artist.