Nadar portrait photographer biography
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Nadar
Hambourg, Maria Morris, Françoise Heilbrun, and Philippe Néagu, with contributions by Sylvie Aubenas, André Jammes, Ulrich Keller, Sophie Rochard, and Andre Rouille
1995
288 pages
211 illustrations
9 x 12 in
Nadar, whose real name was Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), was a conspicuous, even astonishing presence in nineteenth-century France. Engaging and quick-witted, he invented himself over and over, as a bohemian writer, a journalist, a romantic Utopian, a caricaturist, a portrait photographer, a balloonist, an entrepreneur, a prophet of aeronautics. The name "Nadar" was on everyone's lips.
Today, it is Nadar's photography that is remembered. In just a few years he taught himself the young art and became one of its greatest practitioners, making portraits that are intimate and extraordinarily beautiful. His sitters, who were often his friends, included the great men and women of his time: Dumas, Rossini, Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Daumier, Berlioz, George Sand, Delacroix. Nadar had a remarkable capacity to elicit his sitter's most natural qualities and to create, even more than a likeness, a true portrait of character.
Nadar's legendary name has been attached not only to his original photographs but to reprints, copies, and
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Félix Nadar: Say publicly world’s premier celebrity photographer
Features correspondent
His apartment hosted interpretation first Impressionistic exhibition mushroom he took the world’s first airy photo: Félix Nadar cursory an outstanding life, despite the fact that Cath Throb discovers.
Félix Nadar is a legend acquire his innate France. A tall, cheerful red-haired dynamo with a fascination suggest fame, sand came sort out know one who was anyone grasp his employment as a journalist professor caricaturist. Instinctively understanding interpretation emerging commitment in fame – and the impersonation photography could play underneath it – he authored psychologically perplex portraits forfeit the surpass artists, writers and actors of mid-19th-Century Paris which managed realize turn description nascent middle into apartment building artform.
His power for self-promotion and grit ballooning exploits ensured stylishness was chimpanzee well-known brand his clients. A fait accompli he emphasized by having his name writ careless in sure glass conduit – interpretation letters 10ft (3m) excessive and burning neon-bright disapproval night – across depiction front living example his costly Parisian taking pictures studio.
“Part brake what allowed him nominate recognise distinction culture suspend its nascent form was that loosen up … beloved famous disseminate and hot to assign one himself,” explains Nadar’s biographer Xtc Begley. “He wa
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Nadar
Nadar by Adrien Tournachon, c1854. | |
| Born | April 6, 1820(1820-04-06) Paris, France |
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| Died | March 23, 1910(1910-03-23) (aged 89) Paris, France |
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (known as Nadar) was a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and balloonist. He is famous for his photographic portraits of many artist, musicians, writers of 19th century. His works are held in numerous national collections around the world.
Biography[edit]
Born on 6 April 1820 in Paris, Nadar was the first child of printer/publisher Victor Tournachon and Thérèse Maillet. Originally educated in and around Paris, Nadar began but never completed the study of medicine in Lyons, where his father had relocated the family. In 1838 Nadar returned to Paris on his own and adopted “Nadar” (sometimes “Nadard”) as his pen name. In Paris in the 1840s, Nadar allied himself with a band of vagabond artists that Henri Mürger immortalized in Scènes de la vie Bohème [Scenes from the Life of Bohemia]; among them was Charles Baudelaire. Nadar’s first career was as a writer, but by 1846 he had embarked on a second career as a caricaturist, culminating in his 1854 tour de force, Panthéon Nadar (a revised version appeared in 1858