Works by Nadar

Before Nadar took up the camera he drew caricatures, and in his Paris studio he photographed friends such as Gustave Doré, George Sand and Alexandre Dumas.

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon got his pen name from his bohemian friends, perhaps through a joke of adding “dar” to words, so that Tournachon became Tournadar and then Nadar. In the late 1840s he signed his caricatures with it, and his 1854 lithograph Nadar's Pantheon packs writers and journalists, big heads on small bodies, into rows that wind across the sheet. That same year a friend urged him to go into portrait photography.

In his studio he did without lavish sets and needless props, and preferred daylight. Gustave Doré, whom he photographed many times, sits sideways on a plain chair in a checked scarf, looking off to one side. His wife, Ernestine, folds her arms and gives the camera a heavy-lidded, sulky look. Outside his usual literary circle, he also photographed the mother superior of the Little Sisters of the Poor, her face a pale oval framed in white inside a dark hood.

He was a balloonist as well, and in 1858 took the first photographs from the air. The self-portrait Felix Nadar in the Gondola of a Balloon, from about 1863, was staged in the studio in a basket, probably a laundry hamper hung on ropes, to draw paying crowds to his ascents. Portraits dominate the photographs below, mostly from the 1850s and 1860s, with far more men than women and several of Nadar himself.

Sources: Wikipedia, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.