Brought up in a lively artistic environment, he began teaching himself drawing and painting and wrote essays and poetry from a very early age.

His artistic career spans the 20th century, from his early sketches of the First World War, through the creative ferment of the Parisian interwar years, and up to his death in 1984.

He was part of a number of artistic circles that included Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Auric, Erik Satie, Blaise Cendrars, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Paul Eluard, Francis Poulenc, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Colette, Marcel Proust, Jacques Maritain, Max Jacob, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Marie Bell, Louise de Vilmorin, Cecil Beaton and many others.

[citation needed] At the start of the 1930s, in between naïve and happy scenes and various theatrical projects – such as Jean Cocteau's Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel – he produced a series of works in brooding, unsettling, tones (Solitude, 1933).

[citation needed] L'Imposteur (1931) concludes Hugo's first artistic period, which coincides with his move from Paris to the family property at the Mas de Fourques, Lunel, France, following the death of his grandmother.

This imposing painting is an assembly of the most important insights he had acquired thus far: the lessons of the Italian primitives, of Henri Rousseau, of Poussin and Picasso, sources of inspiration on which he is constantly drawing.

The subject of the painting evokes the discomfort of the catechumen in the midst of the faithful, prevented from taking communion during Christmas mass at the Church of Saint-François in Montpellier.

He never felt the need to participate in the artistic debates of his time and paid the price for it by never achieving wide recognition of his work by the general public.

Hugo's work has been widely exhibited, with solo retrospectives taking place in France, England, Japan, Canada and the USA.

His powerful hand, his big Jupiterian eye, his olympism in a way, did not use thunder but little watercolours so vast that it seemed as if their size was the result of a phenomenon of perspective.

Indeed, he seems to view the sea in Brittany from a distance, and the garrigue by the big end of the telescope, which does not prevent him from evoking around us the mysterious odour of seaweed and wild herbs.

Entretiens avec Gustave Thibon by Philippe Barthelet (Éditions du Rocher, Monaco, 2001) Maurice Sachs: "Jean Hugo was calm, kind and generous.

His work reminds us of the marvels that the relaxation of some prince of ancient times might have produced, as can be found in the tales of a thousand and one nights."