The expedition ended in a prison near Magdeburg, but Nadar, irrepressible, was soon back in Paris looking for work with a Polish astrakhan cap perched proudly on his wild locks. Gérard de Nerval introduced him to a friendly editor: ‘This is Tournachon; he’s got lots of spirit, but he’s very crazy.’ The poet and the ex-Pole worked night shifts together, discussing ballooning – a shared enthusiasm – and politics, and sleeping on top of the warm printing presses. All the time, Nadar’s long fingers were drawing.
In the following spring, the editor Charles Philipon began to use Nadar’s caricatures regularly for his new illustrated magazine, Le Journal Pour Rire. Nadar’s professional friendship with the forty-three-year-old editor was to be the most influential of his life. A collection of eighty manuscript letters, which lies in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, still unpublished, vividly traces the growth of a fraught but chaotically fruitful partnership. Philipon appears always thoughtful, severe, appreciative, fatherly; while Nadar is rumbustious, multifarious, and ceaselessly late with copy. Like Emile de Girardin of La Presse, Philipon belonged to the first great generation of mass-circulation editors in Paris, and Nadar rapidly became his star. By 1851 Nadar was being asked to produce as many as 100 separate caricatures a month.
It was thus that sheer pressure of demand created the first atelier Nadar, a vital cooperative formation which was to extend subsequently to his photographic work. Up to a dozen fellow craftsmen were soon employed on Nadar’s inimitable sketches and ideas, and transferring them to the wooden blocks sent for printing all over Paris. The atelier became a kind of syndicate, and his ubiquitous spidery N changed from an artist’s signature to ‘marque de fabrication’. In a press now forbidden, by Imperial decree, all direct political commentary, Nadar spawned an entire world of grotesque little homunculi, a myriad croquetons, in which all the famous writers, actors and painters of the day danced and gibbered in manic processions across the tabloids of Paris. ‘So then, we are lost’, sighed the frères Goncourt, ‘Nadar has now learnt to draw.’
But for Nadar himself, drawing remained the means only, not the long-sought object. The image, the outward physical projection of the inner, private, spiritual man, still obsessed him. How to capture it? And especially, how to capture it in that most elusive of creatures, his fellow writer? ‘How to draw out, for example,’ he asked himself, ‘in the wonderfully sympathetic face of Dumas père, the hints of exotic blood, how to press the simian analogy in a profile which seems a living proof of Darwin, and yet to emphasize above all the predominant note in his character, his extreme and inexhaustible generosity … without ever forgetting, as a final detail, the increased reduction of the conch of his already microscopic ear.’ Of Gautier, he wondered, ‘how not to travesty that oriental beauty, that Olympian serenity’; and of Baudelaire, how one might trace the fantastic combination of ‘strangeness and perfect sincerity’ in that ‘native from the land of the Griffin and the Chimera’. Always it was this good-humoured, but relentless search for the ressemblance morale of his subject.
Nadar’s files in the atelier now contained over 800 studies, including even interview notes and daguerreotypes. From this massive repository of images, Nadar created – with Philipon’s aid and advice – his first distinctive masterpiece, in 1854. This was his celebrated ‘Pantheon Nadar’, a vast single-sheet lithograph cartoon, showing a spiral cortege of over 240 contemporary writers and journalists, each minutely transformed into a jostling gargoyle of the creative spirit. With a printing investment of 200,000 francs, Nadar sold out; the sensation of the season.
Nadar was now thirty-four. He bought a house at 113 rue Saint-Lazare, married, and gave dinner parties for his Bohemian friends, many like him now distinguished. Meanwhile the decisive discovery of his ideal medium occurred almost unnoticed. A painter friend left a second-hand photographic apparatus in the corner of the atelier. Mais, quand même … With predestined ease, Nadar learnt to prepare the wet-collodion glass plates; and his friends, long accustomed to his vagaries, learned to sit unselfconsciously under the hard, searching exposures – between 30 and 120 seconds – in blazing sunlight. From the garden he moved to the attic, which was soon fitted with glass tiles. Nadar’s strange combination of artistic and commercial gifts, and his flair for the new craft of publicity, found its instant culmination. At last the image could be trapped. In the spring of 1855, with the ‘Pantheon’ still fresh from the lithographic stone, Nadar set up as a photographer.
By 1856, with dazzling speed, he had temporarily transformed himself into ‘Nadar et Cie’ to capitalize the business, and he won the grande medaille d’or for photography at the Brussels Exhibition that summer. A legal battle with his younger brother, Adrien, finally won him, in 1857, exclusive right to the ‘marque de fabrication’ of Nadar. Significantly, it was the first time in France that an artistic pseudonym had been disputed as a commercial property. Felix Tournachon’s transformation was now complete: he was ‘Nadar Photographe’.
Within the next fifteen years, the atelier Nadar produced one of the greatest sets of contemporary portraits ever made. From 500,000 or so remaining glass and emulsion negatives, perhaps some 300 prints compose the chef d’oeuvre of the collection. For the most part these are of writers. They cover the whole panorama of mid-nineteenth-century French literature: Baudelaire, Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Lamartine, Hugo, Dumas père et fils, George Sand, Du Camp, Daudet, Verne, Scribe, Murger, Champfleury, the freères Goncourt, Sainte-Beuve, Michelet, Charles Philipon and Emile de Girardin, and literally scores and scores of others. But there are many musicians as well – Berlioz, Rossini, Offenbach; and painters – Delacroix, Corbet, Corot, Monet. There is also a set of Sarah Bernhardt, and a charming nude study of Henri Murger’s mistress, the original Musette of the Bohemian stories. It is, in effect, a second ‘Pantheon Nadar’, except of infinitely greater human penetration. The best photographic portraits should be, wrote Nadar, ‘ample like a Van Dyck, and elaborate like a Holbein’.
Nadar’s portraits, in fact, owed much to painting, especially Ingres (who in turn used Nadar’s photographs for his own studio work). The monumental simplicity of their presentation, the subtle use of their advancing and retreating shadow, and the bold play with the texture of a jacket, blouse or cape, to offset the flesh of face or hands, all are constant marks of Nadar’s work. His best period, up to 1874, coincided with the use of the wet-plate collodion process: this rarely required poses of less than twenty seconds, and emphasized the sense of an intense, prolonged, revelatory gaze deep into the subject’s psyche. After 1872–73, gelatine emulsion brought exposure times down to less than a second, and the subject could be ‘snapped’ without his cooperative effort in the process of capturing and holding the fugitive image.
Nadar defended the autonomy of his art, with force and pride.
The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour, and the first practical steps in a day … But what can be learnt far less readily is the moral nature of your subject; it is the rapid reflex which puts you in touch with your model, makes you grasp and judge his habitual style and ideas, and allows you to produce – not some superficial or lucky shot, some indifferent and tasteful reproduction within the range of the meanest laboratory assistant – but the most familiar and the most favourable likeness: la resemblance intime.
It was an assertion that expressed the effort and experience behind an entire career.
In 1860 Nadar moved to the address which he consecrated for French photography, on the boulevard des Capucines. He charged 50 francs for a half-plate portrait, and joyfully spread the old ‘bull’s blood’ insignia across his whole decor, even down to the wrapping paper. He always continued to scorn Emperor and Court, leaving royal clientele to the Mediterranean beach-photographer Disderi, in the suitable vulgarity of the boulevard des Italiens. At the grand piano under the open studio windows, Jacques Offenbach was encouraged to play variations on the revolutionary Marseillaise, while the Imperial Guard – martial but tone-deaf–trotted in glittering ranks towards the Place de l’Opéra.
In
