Skip to Main Content
Home>Collection>Nadar

Nadar

French, 1820 - 1910

Tournachon, Gaspard-Félix

Biography

Using the pseudonym Nadar, Félix Tournachon was a celebrated artist and caricaturist whose work appeared in satirical newspapers. He learned the photographic process to facilitate his caricatures and opened his own photographic studio. His congenial nature and the unusually large size of his prints attracted celebrities and other dignitaries to his studio and made him one of the most sought-after portraitists of his time.

Félix became embroiled in a legal battle with his younger brother, Adrien, over the exclusive right to the name "Nadar." Félix had arranged for Adrien, a painter, to learn the photographic process and then to open his own photographic studio. When the business began to fail the two collaborated, and Félix supplied financial backing, contacts, and his pseudonym. After he was asked by Adrien to relinquish his share in the studio, Félix was prompted to take legal action when Adrien continued the practice alone using the name "Nadar jeune" (Nadar the younger).

Soon after the court ruled that he was "the only, the true Nadar," Félix moved to a vast studio, the expenses of which forced him to broaden his clientele and adopt conventions of the period, including shading the background to create an oval "vignette," and experimenting with color processes and artificial lighting. His interest waned, and he left the day-to-day activities of the studio to assistants and concentrated on photographing the landscape from a balloon, and, using new techniques in artificial lighting, photographing in the catacombs and sewers of Paris. After his son Paul took over the business in 1895, Félix lived in semiretirement and wrote articles and books until his death at age eighty-nine.

Bibliography

1921
Ref Number: 1928
Lugt, Frits. Les marques de collections de dessins & d'estampes; marques estampillees et ecrites de collections. Amsterdam: Vereenigde drukkerijen, 1921.
1921
Ref Number: 1929
Lugt, Frits. Les marques de collections de dessins & d'estampes; marques estampillees et ecrites de collections. Amsterdam: Vereenigde drukkerijen, 1921.

Related Content

  • Sort by:
  • Results layout:
Show  results per page

Works of Art

  • Filters:
  • Sort by:
  • Results layout:

Limit to works on view

Limit to works with online images

Limit to works of classification:

Limit to works of artist nationalities:

Limit to works belonging to editions:

Limit to works created between:

–

Limit to works containing styles:

Limit to works containing photographic processes:

Find works executed in:


Find works containing subject terms:


Find works with an alternate reference number (for example, Key Set number) containing:


Show  results per page
The image compare list is empty.