{"id":535,"date":"2012-10-01T09:42:35","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T09:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottlewisphotography.eu\/?p=535"},"modified":"2012-10-30T09:29:10","modified_gmt":"2012-10-30T09:29:10","slug":"felix-nadar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scottlewisphotography.eu\/?p=535","title":{"rendered":"F\u00e9lix Nadar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nadar<\/strong><\/h1>\n

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There is a photographer that has fascinated me for years \u201cF\u00e9lix Nadar\u201d<\/strong>. F\u00e9lix Nadar<\/strong> was the pseudonym of \u00a0\u201dGaspard-F\u00e9lix Tournachon\u201d <\/strong>born in April 1820 in Paris and died in\u00a0March 1910. Nadar was a photographer, and a friend of the painters, writers, and intellectuals in Paris during the time of Napoleon III. As an early pioneer of portrait photography he developed lighting concepts that are the basis studio work today. Earlier this year we were in Avignon and stumbled across a museum with an exhibit of over 100 of his photos, you can\u2019t imagine how ecstatic I was to actually see his work up close \u2026.<\/p>\n

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In many ways Nadar (Gaspard Mix Tournachon) typifies the best qualities of the bohemian circle of writers and artists that settled in Paris during the Second Empire. As a young man, he studied medicine in Lyon, but when his father’s publishing house went bankrupt in 1838, he was forced to earn his own livelihood. He began to write newspaper articles that he signed “Nadar.” In 1842 Nadar settled in Paris and began to sell caricatures to humour magazines. By 1853, although he still considered himself primarily a caricaturist, he had become an expert photographer and had opened a portrait studio. Nadar’s immediate success stemmed partly from his sense of showmanship. He had the entire building that housed his studio painted red and his name printed in gigantic letters across a 50-foot (15-metre) expanse of wall. The building became a local landmark and a favorite meeting place of the intelligentsia of Paris. When, in 1874, the painters later known as Impressionists needed a place to hold their first exhibit, Nadar lent them his gallery. He was greatly pleased by the storm the exhibit raised; the notoriety was good for business.
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\nIt was only natural that Nadar should have considered painters his friends, since he learned so much and borrowed so freely from their traditions, utilizing poses and lighting direction. In 1854 he completed his first “Panth\u00e9onNadar,” a set of two gigantic lithographs portraying caricatures of prominent Parisians. When he began work on the second “Panth\u00e9on-Nadar,” he made photographic portraits of the persons he intended to caricature. His portraits of the illustrator Gustave Dor\u00e9 (c. 1855) and the poet Charles Baudelaire (1855) are direct and naturally posed, in contrast to the stiff formality of most contemporaneous portraits. Other remarkable character studies are those of the writer Th\u00e9ophile Gautier (c. 1855) and the painter Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix (1855).<\/p>\n\n\t

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Picture Gallery<\/div>\n\t\t\t
F\u00e9lix Nadar<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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