Portrait painter wanted12/26/2023 In preparing his suit against his brother, Nadar explained why he was a master of this subtle intuitive art. The sympathetic quality of Nadar’s attention, his seductive energy, his jokes and stories, all served his photography, which he understood to be a private theater of personality, a stage for intimate, extemporaneous, collaborative performances between himself and his trusted companions. The suit and the rivalry it cloaked dragged on for three years, until 1859, during which time Nadar made his finest portraits, always working at home in a relaxed and personal manner, and exclusively with friends or celebrities-of his aesthetic and political persuasion, of course-whom he invited to the rue Saint-Lazare studio. After more than a year of vain negotiations to reclaim exclusive rights to his moniker, Nadar finally took Adrien to court. Adrien insisted on continuing to call himself Nadar jeune (Nadar the Younger), while Nadar maintained that his name, which he had made famous, was his alone to use. Nadar transformed Adrien’s languishing studio overnight, and his bustling activity dominated the business until January 16, 1855, when the brothers quarreled and split. “I gave it everything I could,” Nadar wrote, “work, money, personal relations, and my pseudonyum, which followed me.” In September 1854, he convinced Nadar, recently married and over his ears in debt, to help save his business on the boulevard. Meanwhile, Adrien, lax and disorganized, was floundering. He installed a darkroom in his garden apartment at 113 rue Saint-Lazare, and tried out the new technique on friends who came to visit. Pushing Adrien into photography, however, had piqued Nadar’s own interest in the camera-initially, perhaps, as a rapid sketching tool for caricatures. After paying for his photography lessons with Gustave Le Gray, Nadar was brushed off by Adrien, who opened the studio alone. Overcommitted to his activities as a caricaturist, Nadar persuaded his younger brother Adrien Tournachon-a lackluster portrait painter frequently on his dole-to be the principal operator. Photography was just then perceived to be a lucrative affair the new collodion-on-glass negatives produced portraits as sharp as daguerreotypes, but more easily and in multiple copies. That these qualities are also natural to youth is appropriate, for the epoch was modernity’s first act, a time when self-expression was a principled achievement and a serious artist could construct an identity on an adolescent nickname blazoned like a banner.Įarly in 1854, a banker friend proposed backing Nadar in a portrait photography business. Nadar’s imagination, wit, and spontaneity, like his passion for the colorful, unconventional, and free, were tendencies shared with both generations of Romantic writers and artists. Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Delacroix were his early heroes Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire his maturing friends. He had success in all these roles, but what he did best was collect a pantheon of friends whom he honored with his generous and perceptive photographic portraits.īorn Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in 1820, the son of a liberal publisher, Nadar grew up in Paris in the heady ferment of Romanticism. Ringmaster, publicist, and performer in a highly theatrical life, the legendary Nadar wore many hats-those of journalist, bohemian, left-wing agitator, playwright, caricaturist, and aeronaut.
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