Rose Thompson

The novelist, poet and politician, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a towering figure in French 19th-century public life. The author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame became a symbol of the French Republic’s ideals of equality and freedom during his long exile in the Channel Islands. His ink-and-wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes may be less well known than his writings, but they inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists, including the Surrealists; Vincent van Gogh compared them to ‘astonishing things’. This handsome book – the catalogue of an exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Paris Musées – Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France – includes new texts by leading authorities on Hugo and reproductions of many of his finest works on paper, from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and experiments in abstraction.

Hush, Child! Can’t You Hear the Music? is a remarkable collection of black folktales and photographs from rural Georgia. During the 1930s and 1940s Rose Thompson worked as a home supervisor with the Farm Security Administration in middle Georgia. While she worked with farmers and their wives—teaching them to put up preserves, make cotton mattresses, and build chick brooders—she listened to the stories they told. Reading Hush, Child! Can’t You Hear the Music? is like spending an afternoon reminiscing on the front porch. The book is illustrated with photographs taken by Thompson and WPA photographer Jack Delano.