History of Photography

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Nadar’s Signatures: Caricature, Self-Portrait,

Publicity

Jillian Lerner

To cite this article: Jillian Lerner (2017) Nadar’s Signatures: Caricature, Self-Portrait, Publicity,
History of Photography, 41:2, 108-125, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2017.1279924

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Published online: 25 May 2017.

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 Nadar’s Signatures: Caricature,
Self-Portrait, Publicity
Jillian Lerner
Downloaded by [State University NY Binghamton] at 12:41 05 August 2017

As Nadar shifted his attention from caricature to photography in the 1850s, he

produced several fascinating hybrid images. Among these are experiments in
photomontage and uncommon portraits that combine graphic, photographic,
and autographic elements. The author shows how Nadar cultivated a number of
recognisable signatures, which he reiterated and adapted for different image-types,
products, and advertisements. Nadar’s investment in self-portraiture, his penchant
for publicity, and his ability to work across platforms and to balance artistic
ambition and commercial enterprise are explored in depth.
Keywords: portrait-charge, photomontage, caricature, self-portrait, promotion,
réclameJean-Louis-Auguste Commerson (1802–79), Nadar [Gaspard-Félix
Tournachon] (1820–1910)

My heartfelt thanks to Anika Sterba for

This article examines an obscure but pivotal work in Nadar’s oeuvre: a self-portrait that is exceptional research assistance. Preliminary
both photographed and hand-drawn, a rare endeavour in photomontage (figure 1).1 The thoughts on this topic were presented at the
image was produced in 1855 when Nadar first embraced photography and was eager to College Art Association Conference in 2016;
I am indebted to Matthew Biro for
demonstrate the evolution of his career and his public persona. He used this experimental
organising a superb panel on ‘Montage
self-portrait to fuse disparate traces of his signature, forging new terrain between car- Before the Historical Avant-Garde’ and for
icature, photography, and publicity. Montage was just one of the techniques tried on by his ongoing support in developing this
this master of superimposition, who knew how to attach his name to the fame of others, article. I am likewise grateful to the editor
and anonymous reviewers at History of
and to project his recognisable features onto each new territory he ventured into.
Photography for their invaluable feedback.
Although there are many studies of Nadar’s life and work, none concentrates
on his experiments with montage and the associated hybrid images that punctuate Email for correspondence:
his path from caricature to photography in the 1850s. Here I attempt to fill that gap, jillian.lerner@ubc.ca
researching a number of intriguing ‘missing links’ between the graphic and photo- 1 – Nadar’s montage self-portrait is dis-
graphic aspects of Nadar’s oeuvre, while exploring his evolving approach to self- cussed in Claire Bustarret, ‘Dix autoportraits
portraiture and self-promotion. Building towards an analysis of the montaged self- pour un anniversaire’, in La Vie romantique:
Hommage à Loïc Chotard, Paris: Presses de
portrait, I consider Nadar’s early career, highlighting the significance of the por-
L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne 2003,
trait-charge and réclame: elements of graphic depiction and editorial advertising 118–21; Loïc Chotard, Nadar: Caricatures et
that he appears to have continued by photographic means. I go on to discuss several photographies, Paris: Maison de Balzac 1990,
unconventional portraits, self-portraits, and examples of photomontage by Nadar. 86–88 and 126; Richard Taws, ‘Conté’s
Machines: Drawing, Atmosphere, Erasure’,
To conclude, I reflect on the concepts and uses of montage in the mid-nineteenth
Oxford Art Journal, 39:2 (August 2016),
century, probing its situation with respect to the horizons of art, technology, and 246–49; Ségolène Le Men, ‘232. Nadar
commerce. Elevating Photography to the Height of Art’
[catalogue entry], in Daumier, 1808–1879,
Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1999,
382; and Benoît Peeters, Les Métamorphoses
Signatures, Specialties, Self-Portraits de Nadar, Auby-sur-Semois: Marot 1994,
42. It is reproduced without discussion in
Before he took up photography in 1854, Nadar worked as a novelist, journalist, Roger Greaves, Nadar ou le paradoxe vitale,
editor, and caricaturist for the Parisian press. He developed a specialty in graphic Paris: Flammarion 1980, plate 3.

History of Photography, Volume 41, Number 2, May 2017

https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2017.1279924
# 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 Nadar’s Signatures

Figure 1. Nadar (Gaspard-Félix

Tournachon), Untitled (photomontage self-
portrait), salted paper print, 19.8 cm × 13.9
cm, 1855. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty
Open Content Program.
Downloaded by [State University NY Binghamton] at 12:41 05 August 2017

2 – Nadar’s first portrait-charges were pub-

lished in ‘Galerie des gens de lettres’ of
Journal du dimanche in 1847. ‘La Lanterne
magique des auteurs et journalistes’
appeared in Journal pour rire from 24
January to 13 November 1852. Maria Morris
Hambourg, ‘A Portrait of Nadar’, in Nadar,
ed. Maria Morris Hambourg, Françoise
Heilbrun, and Philippe Néagu, New York:
Abrams/Metropolitan Museum of Art 1995,
12–17. On Nadar’s work as a caricaturist,
see also Chotard, Nadar: Caricatures et
photographies, 34–85; Elizabeth Anne
McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial
Photography in Paris, 1848–1871, New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1994,
107–13; and Jean Prinet and Antoinette
Dilasser, Nadar, Paris: Armand Colin 1966,
51–115. On the history of celebrity galleries
and contemporary biography in France, see
Benjamin Roubaud et le Panthéon charivar- portraiture, producing several galleries of contemporary celebrities. One of the first
ique, ed. Ségolène Le Men and Valérie was ‘The Magic Lantern of Authors and Journalists’ in Journal pour rire (1852),
Guillaume, Paris: Maison de Balzac 1988; soon followed by the Panthéon Nadar, a parade of 249 fêted authors in a monu-
and Loïc Chotard, ‘Les grands hommes du
jour’, Romantisme, 100 (1998), 105–14.
mental lithograph self-published in 1854.2 Amidst this procession of notables is
3 – On the portrait archive, see Chotard, Nadar himself (figure 2), highly visible beside a dedication panel in the upper-right
Nadar: Caricatures et photographies, 66–72; corner. These two galleries exhibit several features that would remain crucial for
Nigel Gosling, Nadar, London: Secker & Nadar. Firstly, they feature the portrait-charge: a carefully observed likeness in
Warburg 1976, 5–6; and Peeters, Les
Métamorphoses de Nadar, 27. By 1854
which select features are exaggerated. Choosing not to ridicule his subjects, Nadar
Nadar had ‘un atelier d’art industriel’ with a used the language of caricature to promote his sitter’s qualities and accomplish-
dozen employees and financial backing from ments. Secondly, both publications were drawn from an archive of portraits that
the Péreire brothers. Assistants included Nadar would continue to accumulate and exploit throughout his career. This
Béguin, Gilbert Randon, Victor Prévost, and
Valentin Foulquier. Greaves, Nadar ou le
‘museum’ included rapid sketches, finished drawings, written descriptions, and
paradoxe vitale, 147–51. McCauley adds photographs, some made by Nadar and others contributed by assistants and
Nanteuil, Gavarni, Darjou, Emile Bayard, friends, or sent in by the sitters themselves.3 Endorsing a modern definition of
Couture, and Muller to this list. McCauley, renown, Nadar’s gallery favoured cultural achievements (in literature, art, music,
Industrial Madness, 111 and 385.

109
 Jillian Lerner

Figure 2. Nadar, Panthéon Nadar, litho-

graph (detail), 1854. Bibliothèque nationale
de France / Gallica.
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4 – The Panthéon lithograph includes a por-

and journalism) over traditional heroism or rank. Thirdly, in both works Nadar trait-charge of Nadar and three repetitions of
included his own likeness among the great men of the day. He wielded his name his name: in bold letters on the title, in smaller
like a giant magnet: greedily gathering the work of unnamed contributors and capitals on the dedication panel, and an
appropriating the auras of much more notable sitters under the banner of NADAR, autograph signature at the bottom left.
5 – Prudhomme was an overfed bourgeois
Nadar, Nadar.4 featured in many caricatures and perfor-
The moniker Nadar began as a private pet-name bestowed by friends, but it mances by Monnier. Monnier also posed as
developed into a persona, publicly known and traded. Nadar effectively became a Prudhomme in graphic self-portraits, and in
living caricature, traced on paper and performed in the world. Perhaps he learned a photographic portrait by Etienne Carjat.
See Beatrice Farwell, The Charged Image:
this trick from the illustrator Henri Monnier, whose character Joseph Prudhomme French Lithographic Caricature, 1816–1848,
had crossed over from caricature to life, turning up on the vaudeville stage, at Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum
artist’s studios, and private parties.5 Similarly, the character Nadar made conspic- of Art 1989, 109–18.
uous appearances on the social scene and in sketches and stories by friends. 6 – Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème first
appeared in installments in Le Corsaire-
Alongside the autobiographical accounts – When I Was a Student (1856), History Satan (1845–49), then as a stage production
of Murger (1862), When I Was a Photographer (1900) – Nadar was a protagonist in (1849), and later as a novel (1851).
Henry Murger’s Scenes of Bohemian Life (1845–49) and Jules Verne’s From the 7 – The rue Saint-Nadar is mentioned in
Earth to the Moon (1865).6 His renown was such that coachmen renamed his street, Peeters, Les Métamorphoses de Nadar, 51; and
Greaves, Nadar ou le paradoxe vitale, 181. On
converting the rue Saint-Lazare to the rue Saint-Nadar; and Victor Hugo proved
Hugo’s letter of December 1871 (delivered
that no address was needed to direct letter carriers to the residence of Nadar.7 By without an address on the envelope, only the
1884, journalist Gustave Claudin could claim: ‘The figure of Nadar could not be word Nadar) see Gosling, Nadar, 1.

110

8 – ‘La figure de Nadar serait gravée sur des
pièces de monnaie qu’elle ne serait pas plus
connue. Il n’y a pas en France de notoriété
plus grand que la sienne’. Gustave Claudin,
Mes souvenirs: les boulevards de 1840 à 1871,
Paris: Calmann Lévy 1884, 83, quoted in
Peeters, Les Métamorphoses de Nadar, 11.
9 – On the legal proceedings, see McCauley,
Industrial Madness, 105 and 116–21; and
Greaves, Nadar ou le paradoxe vitale, 171–77.
10 – ‘Signature, n.1’, OED Online, Oxford
University Press 2016. Available at http://
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/eng
lish/signature (accessed 25 November 2016).
11 – Alongside the ‘autograph album, which
Nadar and later his son Paul continued to
keep in their studios to record the impres-
sions of visiting notables’, Nadar collected
letters from celebrities, and copies of his
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own letters; all were sold to the Bibliothèque
nationale de France by Nadar or his heirs.
McCauley, Industrial Madness, 120 and 148.
12 – See Peeters, Les Métamorphoses de Nadar,
63 and 66; and Gosling, Nadar, 10 and 12.
13 – Nadar’s graphic self-portraits appeared
in ‘Lanterne magique’, in the Panthéon
Nadar, in Les Binettes contemporaines in
1854, and in the title-motif for Nadar Jury
au Salon de 1857 (where the author’s lanky
figure, viewed in silhouette, operates a magic
lantern). See also the programme for
Nadar’s 1840 ‘Feste Champestre’ in Nadar,
ed. Hambourg, Heilbrun, and Néagu, 8.
14 – Nadar’s self-description in the caption
to ‘Lanterne magique’ in Journal pour rire
(24 January 1852): ‘Ce très long monsieur,
dont nous ne pouvons vous peindre qu’à la
plume la chevelure, aussi rouge, dit-on, que
ses opinions, et qui porte à chaque joue en
guise de signes des manières d’araignées, se
nomme Félix Tournachon’.
15 – Compare figure 4 with the 1855 por-
traits of Baudelaire (plate 34) and Dumas
père (plate 46) in Nadar, ed. Hambourg,
Heilbrun, and Néagu. On Nadar’s photo-
graphic portraits, see McCauley, Industrial
Madness, 105–48; Françoise Heilbrun,
‘Nadar and the Art of Portrait Photography’,
in Nadar, ed. Hambourg, Heilbrun, and
Néagu, 35–58; Gordon Baldwin and Judith
Keller, Nadar/Warhol/Paris/New York:
Photography and Fame, Los Angeles: J. Paul
Getty Museum 1999; Ulrich Keller, ‘Nadar as
Portraitist: A Photographic Career between
Art and Industry’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
ser. 6, 107 (April 1986), 133–56; Roger
Cardinal, ‘Nadar and the Photographic
Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France’, in
The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham
Clarke, London: Reaktion Books 1992, 6–24;
Max Kozloff, ‘Nadar and the Republic of
Mind’, Artforum, 15:1 (1976), 28–39; and
Dana MacFarlane, ‘“Waiting Still:”
Baudelaire and the Temporality of the
Photographic Portrait’, History of
Photography, 36:1 (February 2012), 3–14.
16 – Allegedly Nadar wore this ‘Plains
Indian outfit’ to a costume ball in 1863.
Baldwin and Keller, Nadar/Warhol, 112.
Nadar’s Signatures
more widely known if it was engraved on our currency. There is not in all of France
a notoriety greater than his’.8
In an unprecedented feat, the name Nadar was transformed into a commercial
trademark, legally recognised in 1857.9 Today we would call it a brand. But I prefer
the term signature: ‘a person’s name written in a distinctive way as a form of
identification’ or a ‘distinctive pattern, product, or characteristic by which someone
or something can be identified’.10 Signatures were an obsession for Nadar. He
collected autographs from the many noteworthy people he encountered and
befriended throughout his long life.11 Also, he scrawled his own autograph every-
where – on prints, photographs, book frontispieces, letters, invoices, and signage –
always careful to replicate the distinctive hand-drawn flourish in each new medium.
Nadar even had a signature colour: red was the colour of his hair and his republican
passions, of the ink on his calling cards and photographic prints, of his favourite
coat, and the decor of his flagship studio at 35, boulevard des Capucines, from the
paint on interior walls to the massive gas-lit sign that advertised his signature on
the facade.12
Nadar seems to have understood his likeness and his life-story as signatures –
distinctive flourishes that could be amplified and redrawn to produce an identifiable
pattern. He made an astounding number of self-portraits. There were literary and
graphic self-portraits in the comic press, on party invitations, and in works of art
criticism.13 Each charged portrait underscored the same peculiar Nadarian traits (figure
3): he was a ‘very long gentleman’ with unruly hair ‘as red, they say, as his opinions’,
wispy side-whiskers, vivacious eyes, and ‘spider-like manners’.14 The camera portraits
were even more numerous and varied. Some of the early photographic self-portraits
(figure 4) exhibit the close-up intensity and painterly style Nadar developed for his
portraits of artistic celebrities such as Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas père.15
(Notice how he scrawled his signature and address directly on the surface of these
prints.) Others are overtly performative, as in the absurd 1863 pose in Native American
costume and baroque wig.16
Nadar often made self-portraits to announce a new project or technique. His
experiments in electric lighting, aeronautics, subterranean exploration, and photo-
sculpture were each marked with a self-portrait that would evidence technical
innovation while reasserting his familiar traits. There are striking deer-in-the-head-
lights portraits that attest to his first trials with photography by artificial light (he
filed a patent in 1861),17 and novelty cartes de visite of Nadar the balloonist in
campy studio poses that admit the cheap effects of this image-type.18 Each time, he
presents himself with a characteristic mixture of humour and territory-marking
earnestness.
Consider, for instance, Nadar’s self-portrait as intrepid explorer of the Paris
catacombs (figure 5). He poses amongst vessels and lighting equipment that
announce the scientific magic of his process. His wooden bearing underlines the
incredible technical feat of light-writing in an underground setting and recalls the
ghostly novelty of the earliest photographic portraits. Appearing as an inert thing
among things in a spectral still-life portrait, Nadar aligns himself with legendary
‘primitives’ Louis Daguerre and Hippolyte Bayard.19 Additional layers of meaning
are added by the grim backdrop of bones and the stone marker indicating that these
relics were recently transferred from the Madeleine cemetery. The choice of this
particular site – where the remains of kings, revolutionaries, criminals, and ordinary
citizens are stacked together, equally and anonymously – resurrects republican
memories that were being actively dismantled by Emperor Napoleon III and his
urban rebuilding schemes.20
A characteristic contradiction: Nadar expresses humility before the ‘egalitarian
confusion of death’21 and a hubristic urge to assert his own place in history. There
are hints that he imagines this self-portrait in the netherworld as an inverted
pendant to the Panthéon Nadar. Note how the lantern casts a bold cruciform
shadow just to the left of Nadar’s body in the photograph, in a strong echo of
111
 Jillian Lerner

Figure 3. Diolot, Nadar, wood-engraving

(after a sketch by Nadar), 1854. From Les
Binettes contemporaines, Paris: G. Havard
1854. Bibliothèque nationale de France /
Gallica.
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Figure 4. Nadar, Self-Portrait, salted paper

print, 1855. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty
Open Content Program.

112
 Nadar’s Signatures

Figure 5. Nadar, Catacombs of Paris. Bones

from the Ancient Cemetery of the Madeleine,
modern digital reproduction from collo-
dion-on-glass negative, 1860. Ministère de la
Culture /Médiathèque du Patrimonie, Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais /Art Resource, NY.
Downloaded by [State University NY Binghamton] at 12:41 05 August 2017

17 – Nadar, ed. Hambourg, Heilbrun, and

Néagu, 253. He began his experiments with
artificial light in 1858, but the first results were
too bright. After devising a system of reflectors
and mirrors, he filed the patent in 1861. Peeters,
Les Métamorphoses de Nadar, 79–80. In the
catacombs Nadar used carbon arc lamps pow-
ered by Bunsen batteries. Michel Frizot,
‘Artificial Light’, in A New History of
Photography, ed. Michel Frizot, Cologne:
Könemann 1998, 285.
18 – As noted by Baldwin and Keller, the
absurdly small basket in which Nadar sits is
probably a laundry hamper. The other
unconvincing props include binoculars, an
anchor, and a backdrop of painted clouds.
Baldwin and Keller, Nadar/Warhol, 48–49.
19 – Nadar’s pose resonates with Hippolyte
Bayard’s Le Noyé of 1840 (an ironic, fictional
self-portrait as an anonymous cadaver) and
recalls the stiff appearance of sitters in early the signpost staked to the left of Nadar’s figure in the lithograph (figure 2). With
daguerreotypes (due to the long exposures). See that signpost, Nadar dedicated his work to future readers of the year 3607, who
Jillian Lerner, ‘The Drowned Inventor: Bayard, might prize his graphic monument to the historic figures of the nineteenth
Daguerre, and the Curious Attractions of Early
century.22 Taking up a similar pose in the necropolis, Nadar pays tribute to the
Photography’, History of Photography, 38:3
(August 2014), 218–32. Nadar was surely anonymous dead in the catacombs alongside the living celebrities he recognised in
familiar with the work of Bayard, who was a print culture. He defies the finitude of life and announces he will continue to frame
founding member of the Société Française de his era for posterity. The photographic pioneer who ‘penetrates [. . .] the most
Photographie. Hippolyte’s nephew Emile
profound, and most secret’ realms,23 is also an historical witness who chooses
Bayard was one of Nadar’s assistants. Greaves,
Nadar ou le paradoxe vitale, 185. what will be brought to light and remembered.
20 – The Madeleine cemetery housed vic- Before we circle back to the central case study it is worth considering one more
tims of the Terror, including Louis XVI and self-portrait by Nadar that serves to demonstrate a novel technique. In his revolving
Marie Antoinette. On Nadar’s work in the
self-portrait of 1864 (figure 6), Nadar presents twelve views of his own head in a
catacombs and sewers, see Shao-Chien
Tseng, ‘Nadar’s Photography of single rectangular grid. Initially, I thought this work to be a montage – a series of
Subterranean Paris: Mapping the Urban discrete positives laid out next to each other and re-photographed – however, the
Body’, History of Photography, 38:3 (August high-resolution reproduction reveals the action of multiple exposures on a single
2014), 233–54; and Le Paris souterrain de negative.24 Here the tabular arrangement is not intended as a narrative device or
Félix Nadar 1861: Des os et des eaux, Paris:
Caisse nationale des monuments historiques comparative apparatus, but as a means to study the subject from different vantages.
et des sites (CNMHS) 1982. A sense of movement, temporal unfolding, and volumetric representation is

113
 Jillian Lerner

Figure 6. Nadar, Study for a Photo-

Sculpture, albumen print, 1864. Bibliothèque
nationale de France.

21 – Nadar, ‘Paris souterrain aux cata-

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combes et égouts’ (1900), reprinted in Le

Paris souterrain de Félix Nadar, 21.
22 – The signpost makes it easy to locate
Nadar’s figure in the composition. The ded-
ication reads: ‘DEDICACE: Au Monsieur que
je regrette assurément d’avance de ne pas
connaître et qui le deuxième jour de la
troisième lune de l’an 3607 courra les ventes
comme un chien perdu pour acheter à prix
d’or cet exemplaire devenu introuvable et
dont il ne pourra se passer pour son grand
travail sur les figures historiques du XIXe
siècle. NADAR’.
23 – Félix Nadar, ‘Paris souterrain aux cata-
combes et égouts’, in Quand j’ étais photo-
graphe, Paris: Flammarion 1900, 116: ‘Nous
allions pénétrer, révéler les arcanes des
available to the viewer who reads the individual frames from left to right and top to caverns les plus profondes, et plus secrètes’.
bottom. 24 – Evidence of slight spectral overlaps
Nadar made at least two of these revolving portraits – one of himself and between the frames proves the transitions
another of his friend Gustave Arosa.25 Paul Nadar noted that his father pro- cannot be physical or hand-worked. They
must be produced through multiple expo-
duced them as studies for sculpture.26 This was a representational frontier that sures on the negative.
several practitioners were exploring in the 1860s. François Willème patented a 25 – Jean Dominique Gustave Arosa (1818–
process of ‘photosculpture’ whereby the contours present in photographic por- 83) was a financier, photographer, and art
traits were applied to the manufacture of sculptures. Sitters who came to pose in collector. There are interesting differences in
the two revolving portrait compositions.
Willème’s Paris studio (opened in 1863) were encircled by twenty-four cameras
The twelve frames of Arosa start and end on
installed on the periphery of a giant rotunda. The cameras recorded twenty-four profile views. The sequence does not pro-
simultaneous views of the sitter from different angles; these two-dimensional vide a convincing feeling of circling the sit-
profiles were projected and then transcribed by a pantograph to determine the ter. The frames seem out of order, making
more sense as a complete revolution if one
three-dimensional contours of a clay maquette. The client could expect his or
views first the middle row, then the top,
her finished portrait within forty-eight hours, drawn up as a statuette, medal- then the bottom. By contrast, the twelve
lion, or bust.27 frames of Nadar start and end on rear views,
Apparently this was a photographic arena Nadar had to test himself.28 He with only the central frames of the middle
row revealing his whole face. This arrange-
forged a pointedly easy alternative to Willème’s complex system and its expensive,
ment creates a suspenseful revelation of
customised architecture. Nadar simply revolved the sitter’s chair in front of a single character, and indicates more effectively a
stationary camera, a method that could be practised in any portrait studio without sitter who completes a single 360-degree
specialised equipment. The results are characteristically witty and visually sophis- revolution in one direction before us. On the
revolving self-portrait, see Baldwin and
ticated, although I believe Nadar’s method impractical as a basis for sculpture.
Keller, Nadar/Warhol, 72–73.
Whereas Willème captured simultaneous exposures of an unmoving subject, 26 – The revolving portrait of Arosa at the
Nadar’s twelve profiles were taken successively, and they register subtle movements Musée D’Orsay, Paris (inv. PHO 1991 227)
(for example, where his impassive expression gives way to an impish grin) that bears a hand-written note by Paul Nadar on
the verso: ‘Arosa, ami de Nadar, séquence de
would be difficult to reconcile in a single volumetric whole. The series serves
portraits préparatoire à une sculpture’. The
admirably as a concept piece that illustrates how Nadar’s camera reveals character Bibliothèque nationale de France owns a
and extends the viewer’s perception to previously unexamined realms (like the back mounted albumen print in FOL EO-15 (4).

114

27 – Willème’s patents were registered in
1860–61. See Robert A. Sobieszek,
‘Sculpture as the Sum of its Profiles:
François Willème and Photosculpture in
France, 1859–1868’, Art Bulletin, 62:4
(December 1980), 617–30; and Philippe
Sorel, ‘Photosculpture’, in Paris in 3D:
From Stereoscopy to Virtual Reality
1850–2000, ed. François Reynaud, Paris:
Paris Musées 2000, 80–89. Willème’s
invention was well known in Paris through
press coverage, including articles by
Théophile Gautier in Moniteur universel
and Le Monde illustré (both 1864). His
sculptures were displayed at his own studio
on the boulevard de l’Etoile, in the vitrines
of the Bisson brothers, and at the 1867
Universal Exhibition. Sobieszek, ‘Sculpture
as the Sum’, 618 and 629.
28 – While Nadar was surely aware of
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Willème’s work, I have not found evidence of
collaboration. Citing the 1867 Annuaire
et almanach du commerce, de l’industrie, de la
magistrature et de l’administration, Sobieszek
notes that Willème, de Marnyhac et Cie had a
branch studio at 35 boulevard des Capucines.
Sobieszek, ‘Sculpture as the Sum’, 618. This
was the address of Nadar’s studio, but also
home to the Bisson brothers’ salon d’exposi-
tion on the ground floor (according to
Greaves, Nadar ou le paradoxe vitale, 178),
where Willème’s sculptures were exhibited
according to Sobieszek (see previous note).
29 – The dates given are 1854 (Greaves,
Nadar ou le paradoxe vitale, 391) and 1854–55
(Chotard, Nadar: Caricatures et photogra-
phies, 126); these scholars consulted the con-
tretype/collage negative on glass belonging to
the CNMHS, Paris (Na 242, n362). The J. Paul
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, possesses a
salted paper print (84.XM.436.8) for which
the dates 1855–60 are given. As far as I can
determine, this is an original print from the
collage negative that passed directly from the
Nadar family to Michel-François Braive, then
to André Jammes, to Sam Wagstaff Jr, and on
to the Getty.
30 – McCauley, Industrial Madness, 118–21.
31 – Ibid., 121–41.
32 – Ibid., 106.
33 – ‘French newspapers and many period-
icals carried numerous covert advertise-
ments, called “réclames,” on all pages [. . .]
“editorial advertising,” articles or illustra-
tions created for the purpose of advertising,
or articles that included advertising [. . .]
often little gap existed between news and
advertising in France’. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of
Parisian Modernity: Culture and
Consumption in the Nineteenth Century,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 5–7.
Réclame often took the form of favourable
reviews of books, artworks, and spectacles. It
was difficult to tell whether such mentions
were independent editorial opinions, pro-
motional favours for friends, or paid adver-
tisements, especially given the incestuous
professional and social networks of Parisian
writers and artists.
Nadar’s Signatures
of his own balding head). But it is not surprising that his revolving portrait was not
developed into a standard product or sculptural technique.
From Caricature to Photography: Réclame and the Charged Photograph
In each of these cases Nadar inserted himself in the picture when it seemed prudent
to forge a connection between his novel pursuits and his known signatures. The
montage self-portrait (figure 1) is consistent with this pattern: made in his first year
or two of experimentation with the camera, it announces his leap into photography
and establishes continuity with his previous renown as a caricaturist, publicist, and
living caricature. Scholars give a range of dates for this image, from 1854 to 1860.29
Nadar took up photography early in 1854 but he was surely distracted by the
launch of his Panthéon and its publicity campaign through the spring and summer,
his marriage to Ernestine in September, and the decision to join his brother
Adrien’s photography studio in the autumn. The brothers’ collaboration ended
with a quarrel in January 1855. I believe the montage self-portrait was made after
this, when Nadar sought to establish his own photographic studio at his lodgings on
the rue Saint-Lazare and to distinguish his fledgling business from competitors. As
Anne McCauley has demonstrated, he then mounted a multi-tiered campaign to
become ‘the only true Nadar’, defining that entity with a full press of art, journal-
ism, advertising, and a legal suit against his brother for exclusive rights to the
name.30
On the artistic front Nadar was keen to develop a distinctive style of portrait
photography. In contrast to his rivals, Nadar’s camera portraits would be artistic
rather than commercial, evocative and spiritual as opposed to precise. Nadar
positioned himself as a photographic auteur who could create an ‘intimate resem-
blance’, drawing on the psychological insight of a caricaturist, a painterly feeling for
light, and the close rapport he had with his illustrious sitters.31 Nadar had many
well-placed friends, 134 of whom testified that he was widely known and respected
in the artistic community as the one and only Nadar.32
The montage self-portrait would make sense at this juncture in 1855 as an
assertion of Nadar’s unique persona, a formal experiment, and evidence of how his
practice was evolving. He appears to test how photography can collaborate with
aspects of caricature and journalism that were already a signature for him, speci-
fically the portrait-charge and the réclame.
A prominent feature of the Parisian press in mid-century, réclame was essen-
tially a mode of advertising that masqueraded as editorial content.33 While some
forms of réclame were covert, Nadar was adept with the blatant variety. To publicise
his Panthéon, Nadar shelled out 6759 francs for paid advertisements in the large
circulation newspapers. He also counted on his journalist friends to réclame the
work in their regular columns.34 He happily exploited the visibility of his own
caricatural review of current events in the Journal pour rire. Four vignettes in
‘Review of the First Trimester of 1854 by Nadar’ are unabashed réclame for the
Panthéon Nadar.35 Although the sketches are small and cursory, Nadar has no
trouble highlighting his name and achievement. Three of the scenes feature a
colossal version of the lithograph surrounded by throngs of curious onlookers,
and the cruciform shape of Nadar’s dedication panel is amplified in each. In one
pretentious panel (figure 7), this overgrown signpost is scrutinised by Nadar’s
monumental predecessor: ‘The Panthéon Saint-Geneviève has come to see for itself
if everything being said about the Panthéon Nadar is true’ (Le Panthéon Saint-
Geneviève allant voir par lui-même si tout ce qu’on dit du Panthéon Nadar est
vrai).
Clearly, Nadar already considered his caricature galleries a form of réclame,
typically stamped with his name, an irrepressible self-portrait, and sometimes a list
of his publications as well. The same exuberant features are repeated time and
again: long spindly legs, wild hair, animated eyes, and buoyant signature.
115
 Jillian Lerner

Figure 7. Nadar, ‘Review of the First

Trimester of 1854’, wood-engraving. From
Journal pour rire, 134 (22 April 1854).
Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica.
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34 – On the publicity campaign (including

paid adverts and réclame from friends), see
Chotard, Nadar: Caricatures et photogra-
phies, 75–80; and Prinet and Dilasser,
Nadar, 78 and 84.
Sometimes reiteration was achieved through recycling, as was the case with Binettes 35 – Four of sixteen vignettes on page 4 are
contemporaines, a series of comic biographies published in 1854.36 Given free rein to réclame for the Panthéon. ‘Revue du Premier
mine Nadar’s existing stock of portrait-charges, the publisher August Commerson Trimestre de 1854 par Nadar’, Journal pour
rire, 134 (22 April 1854), 1–5.
chose sixty charcoal studies from the Panthéon Nadar, and had them reproduced in
36 – Les Binettes contemporaines, ed.
wood-engraving (figure 3). The text Commerson wrote to accompany Nadar’s self- Auguste Commerson, Paris: Gustave
portrait elaborates upon the already caricatured traits: ‘The child came into the world Havard 1854. There were six portraits in
with [. . .] hair red and as disorderly as his ideas [. . .] the midwife pulled Félix by his each volume. Commerson featured himself
and Nadar in the same volume, along with
feet, so that it was no longer a man she brought into the world but a horrible daddy
other publishing insiders Louis Huart (of Le
long-legs’.37 Having augmented the portrait-charge and the legend, Commerson Charivari), Charles Philipon, and Eugène de
closes with réclame for Nadar’s novels and his work as a caricaturist for Le Mirecourt (a rival in the publication of
Charivari, Revue comique, Journal pour rire, and Tintamarre, the Panthéon Nadar, biographies).
37 – ‘L’enfant vint au monde avec [. . .] les
Nadar-Jury au Salon, and, of course, these charming Binettes.38
cheveux rouges et en désordre comme ses
Nadar returned the favour with several portraits of Commerson, who was idées [. . .] la sage femme le tirerait par les
featured in the Panthéon, the Binettes, and the frontispiece of Almanach du pieds [. . .] elle tira tant et tant Félix par les
Tintamarre pour 1853. Nadar also portrayed Commerson in one of his earliest pieds, que ce ne fut plus un homme qu’elle
mit au monde, mais un horrible faucheux’.
camera portraits, in which the vocabulary of the portrait-charge and réclame are
Les Binettes contemporaines, ed.
evident (figure 8).39 The pose suggests that Commerson – editor in chief of Le Commerson, vol. 10, 25–26.
Tintamarre – has fallen asleep while reading his own newspaper. He reclines in a 38 – Ibid., 34.
chair, with eyes closed and the paper situated on his lap so the masthead is visible. 39 – The original plate (reproduced in figure
The newspaper functions like a telling attribute, typical of both caricature and 8) has four exposures, revealing two slightly
different poses, each captured twice on the
commercial studio photographs in which emblematic props communicate the plate with a dual-lens camera. The upper
sitter’s profession or interests. Here it also signals the presence of réclame: a subtle lens has a slightly elevated vantage tilted
tout for the man’s product embedded within the artistic/journalistic framework of down toward the sitter; the lower lens
his portrait. There is a wisecrack here too, because réclame is the not-so-secret heart includes more of the sitter’s lower body.
Nadar selected a portion of the top left
of the touted product, the main substance of Le Tintamarre, and the foundation of image for enlargement, reproduction, and
its business model. sale in the Edition Nadar.

116
 Nadar’s Signatures

Figure 8. Nadar, Jean Louis Auguste

Commerson (asleep with the newspaper Le
Tintamarre), modern digital reproduction
from collodion-on-glass negative, 1854–55.
Ministère de la Culture /Médiathèque du
Patrimonie, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais /Art
Resource, NY.
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40 – Definition by the editors of Le

Tintamarre, 2 (2–9 April 1843), 1. On the
popular traditions of charivaris, burlesque
processions, and rough music, see Robert
Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other
Episodes in French Cultural History, New
York: Vintage Books 1984, 75–104.
41 – As of the second number (2–9 April
1843), the masthead read: ‘Le Tintamarre,
Critique de la Réclame, Satire des Puffistes,
Journal d’industrie, de littérature, de musique,
de modes et de théatres. (Annonces
permanentes.)’.
42 – Le Tintamarre, 2 (2–9 April 1843), 1:
‘un des éléments de notre mission; car
dépister la réclame, dévoiler le charlatanisme
[. . .] Mais hâtons-nous de dire que notre
principal but, enfondant le Tintamarre est
de nous faire l’écho impartial et retentissant
des découvertes et perfectionnements dans
l’industrie, dans la littérature, la musique, les
modes et les théâtres; d’encourager les
inventions utiles et les hommes honorables
qui les propagent. Pour terminer pompeu-
sement cette petite profession de foi, nous
pourrions, afin d’affrioler la clientèle, pro-
mettre, comme tout journal qui se fonde,
que nous donnerons au Tintamarre une
immense publicité, que nous le tirerons à des
millions d’exemplaires’.
Tintamarre means ‘blaring noise with confusion and disorder’; it invokes the
folk tradition of discordant mock serenades performed by community members to
shame an individual or demonstrate disapproval.40 Like the closely related term
charivari (already seized upon by publisher Charles Philipon in 1832) it was a
fitting title for a satirical publication. Tintamarre, Critique of Réclame, Satire of
Puffists, Journal of Industry, Literature, Music, Fashions and Theatres was launched
by Commerson in 1843.41 Here is a taste of the journal’s mischievous and contra-
dictory aims:
One of the elements of our mission: to detect réclame, unveil charlatanism [. . .]
but we must hasten to say that our principle goal in founding Tintamarre is to
become the impartial and resounding echo of discoveries and perfections in
industry and literature [. . .] to encourage inventions and the honourable men
who propagate them. To pompously terminate this small profession of faith,
we could, in order to allure clients, promise [. . .] to provide an immense
publicity, to print millions of copies.42
Thus readers are given to expect three incompatible things: firstly, satire that aims
to unmask perfidious practices of publicity; secondly, ‘impartial’ coverage of inven-
tions and discoveries, which, however, we should recognise as réclame; and thirdly,
straightforward advertisements from paying clients. This was a newspaper devoted
to parodying the devices of advertising, while thoroughly exploiting advertising as a
technique and means of commercial survival. Le Tintamarre was financed entirely

117
 Jillian Lerner

by advertisement revenue, so it could be distributed free of charge to two thousand

reading rooms and public establishments in Paris.43 Paid advertisements colonised 43 – Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 94.
half the space, while the rest contained sarcastic parodies of réclame, and self-
parodies of the paper’s reliance on advertising.
Nadar’s photographic portrait of Commerson mimics the tone of Le
Tintamarre, playing up the ambiguous intentions of editorial and advertising. It
is a satirically charged photograph: a seemingly conventional camera portrait with a
parodic emphasis in the choreography of the pose. It was brilliant to have the sitter
close his eyes and feign sleep, because it makes the scene appear captured rather
than staged; it suggests Commerson is not conscious of posing with his newspaper,
so the act of self-promotion can be read as inadvertent. Nadar exploits the see-
mingly impartial, objective qualities of photography to deliver a sly character study
that is also a réclame. The portrait is at once an earnest presentation of likeness, an
effective form of publicity, and an ironic self-parody of publicity similar to the type
developed so successfully by Commerson’s team at Le Tintamarre.
This is the only photographic portrait by Nadar with obvious traces of a
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satirical charge and réclame.44 However, one other, more muted, possibility 44 – Karen Pope makes a convincing case
comes to mind: a portrait of Charles Philipon also made in the early years of that Nadar’s practice as a caricaturist
‘influenced his approach in making photo-
experimentation at the Saint-Lazare studio (figure 9). Posed in strong directional
graphic portraits of the same people’. Karen
light, the figure casts a stark shadow upon a simple white backdrop.45 As a result, Pope, ‘Nadar’s “Portraits-Charges”’, The
the camera captured two portraits of Philipon: a detailed three-quarter view of his Library Chronicle of the University of Texas
face, offset by the flat two-dimensional profile of his shadow. Furthermore, Philipon at Austin, 17 (1981), 72. The camera por-
traits she discusses do not evidence parody
is holding his cigar so that it seems to touch this dark silhouette on the background. or réclame, but she does point to examples
This is a charged reference to the act of shadow tracing featured in the title-motif of where Nadar’s photographic portraits
Philipon’s groundbreaking publication La Silhouette, Beaux-Arts, Dessins, Moeurs, reiterate a pose or characteristic expression
Théâtres, Caricatures, etc. (1829–31).46 Part play on words and part graphic figura- he had already brought out in caricature.
45 – Similar poses with stark shadows can
tion of the title La Silhouette, Nadar’s portrait is an understated réclame for
be seen in contemporary portraits of
Philipon’s journal. Moreover, the pun had significance for Nadar’s own route Gustave Doré (1854) and Adrien
from caricature to photography, because the act of shadow tracing – preserving Tournachon (1854–55); see plates 25 and 28
an ephemeral silhouette, capturing an indexical picture written by light – was also a in Nadar, ed. Hambourg, Heilbrun, and
Néagu.
metaphor for photography.47 Nadar pays tribute to a dear friend who was his
46 – The title motif of La Silhouette features
publisher, mentor, and the ‘godfather of political caricature in France’.48 In the a young woman tracing the shadowy profile
process he roots the history of photography in caricature, providing an advanta- of a bearded young man on a mirror or
geous framework for the appreciation of his own career trajectory. This is a prime panel behind him. Smaller black silhouettes
adorn a frame to the left of these central
visual example of the historiographic shrewdness Stephen Bann recognised in
figures.
Nadar’s memoirs: his unmatched ‘ability to integrate photography into a thicker 47 – On the myth of the Corinthian maid
history’.49 He also had a knack for integrating his autobiography into the thicker (who outlined the shadow of her departing
history of his century. lover on a wall), silhouette tracing, and
Presumably Nadar crafted his montaged self-portrait around this time (figure theories of photography, see Geoffrey
Batchen, Burning With Desire: The
1), and he employed a similar hybrid vocabulary, with heightened emphasis on Conception of Photography, Cambridge,
caricature as theme and technique. If the portraits of Commerson and Philipon are MA: MIT Press 1997, 112–20.
charged photographs (carrying an extra pulse of clever interpretation and biogra- 48 – Maria Morris Hambourg recognised
phical reference), Nadar’s montaged self-portrait is a photographic caricature: a Nadar’s pun in this portrait: ‘his cigar
poised like a lithographer’s crayon, Philipon
satirical sketch in which photographic elements are augmented, redrawn, and emerges from the forceful shadow he casts
captioned. A camera image of the artist’s face and torso present a detailed likeness: and that he seems responsible for drawing.
we see his favourite coat and a loose cravat, along with the ruffled hair and alert It is a witty homage, at once a photographic
gaze familiar from portrait sketches. Below the waist the pencil takes over, and portrait of the successful publisher of gra-
phic arts and a punning reference to the first
natural morphology gives way to the bold fantastic forms of Nadar’s graphic style. of his many caricatural reviews, La
His legs stretch into the dancing spidery appendages that are an unmistakable Silhouette’. Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘26.
signature. They retrace the daddy-long-legs profile of caricatured portraits and they Nadar. Philipon, 1854’ [catalogue entry], in
also echo the exuberant squiggly peaks of Nadar’s autograph letter N. Portrait and Nadar, ed. Hambourg, Heilbrun, and
Néagu, 229–30.
signature are reconciled, superimposed. Liberated from the empirical possibilities 49 – Stephen Bann, ‘“When I Was a
some said photography was limited to, this impish figure proves he can cavort in an Photographer”: Nadar and History’, History
imaginary plane. Nadar exploits the semiotic collision of photography and carica- and Theory, 48:4 (December 2009), 111.
ture to produce an image both real and fantastic, mechanical and hand-made. He

118

Figure 9. Nadar, Charles Philipon, salted
paper print, 1856–58. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Downloaded by [State University NY Binghamton] at 12:41 05 August 2017
50 – Loïc Chotard identifies this object as a
bottle, without explaining its presence. He
notes the work is ‘one of the rare known
examples of an effective alliance between
caricature and photography’. Chotard,
Nadar: Caricatures et photographies, 86 and
126. The reference to a steeple is from Sam
Wagstaff Jr, who bought four hundred
works by Nadar from antiquarian book
dealer André Jammes in 1975 and sold his
collection to the Getty in 1984. In his col-
lection files, Wagstaff entered ‘Nadar dan-
cing on a steeple’ as the title of the montage
self-portrait. See 2005.M.46 Wagstaff
Correspondence, Box 88, series IV, folder 7,
Special Collections, Getty Research Institute.
51 – J. J. Grandville’s Un Autre Monde,
Paris: H. Fournier 1844, featured the porte-
crayon as emblem of the illustrator, in a
work that proclaimed the emancipation of
graphic art over accompanying text. In the
preface illustrations, a plume pen agrees to
describe whatever the porte-crayon draws,
rather than vice versa.
52 – I thank the anonymous reviewer of this
journal for calling my attention to the
excellent article by Richard Taws.
Reconciling the porte-crayon and the roof of
the Panthéon, Taws’s reading merges
admirably with Wagstaff’s title ‘Nadar dan-
cing on a steeple’. Taws, ‘Conté’s Machines’,
246–49.
Nadar’s Signatures
achieves transubstantiation: passing from life into art, from matter to spirit, from
photography into the sketch – and back again.
The figure emerges from a pointed object at the bottom of the page, identified
by some commentators as a bottle or a steeple.50 To my eyes it is unmistakable as
the tip of a pencil or lithographic crayon held by a porte-crayon, the typical
accessory featured in portraits of illustrators like Nadar.51 (It is visible, for example,
in Nadar’s self-portrait in ‘Lanterne magique’ and in his depiction of Philipon in
Binettes contemporaines.) On this I agree with Richard Taws, who also identified
this object as a porte-crayon and noted Nadar’s tactical intelligence for recuperating
the possibilities of past media to new effect. Taws goes on to suggest that Nadar
strikes a ‘telegraphic pose’ on the Pantheon rooftop, his awkwardly angled limbs
reminiscent of the hinged metal arms of a Chappe telegraph, which pivoted to
convey coded messages.52 This reading accords beautifully with Patricia Mainardi’s
intuition of another significant memory-trace in the montage self-portrait: the
unnatural angle of Nadar’s legs recalls his well-known 1849 caricature of the
opportunist Moisseu Réac as a marionette, ‘perched atop the telegraph to get the
news from Paris’, with frantic limbs broadcasting his reactions.53
The work of the porte-crayon in the montage is further supported by the
activity of Nadar’s left hand, which appears to hold a grease crayon or stick of
charcoal. These drawing tools announce Nadar’s profession as a caricaturist and
emphasise his act of self-portraiture, the fact that he actively draws himself and
possesses the power to recreate himself over and over. They also call our attention
to the juxtaposition of image-types and modes of making within the work. One of
the artist’s hands holds an implement, while the other rests in his pocket. The
manual action of the crayon – along with the porte-crayon, apparently still at work
119
 Jillian Lerner

drawing the figure – collaborates with the invisible hand of the photographer, 53 – I am grateful to Patricia Mainardi for
whose work is already done. generously sharing this insight (and asso-
ciated images) with me by email after hear-
Below the porte-crayon is a hand-written caption: ‘to the great man, the instant ing my paper at the College Art Association
daguerreotype gives recognition’ (or the daguerreotype gives instant recognition).54 annual conference in 2016. Nadar’s
It is a cheeky rewording of the motto inscribed on the facade of the Pantheon ‘Nouvelles télégraphiques’ is an eight-image
building in Paris, originally the Church of Sainte-Geneviève, converted in 1791 to a sequence in ‘La vie publique et privée de
Mossieu Réac’, La Revue comique à l’usage
secular mausoleum dedicated ‘to the great men [who] the Fatherland recognises’.
des gens sérieux (7 April 1849), 322. It is
Here Nadar returns to the theme of modern celebrity, and the fact that honours reproduced in Chotard, Nadar: Caricatures
once bestowed by the state have been eclipsed by the fame created by artists and et photographies, 40; and in Philippe
journalists. He extends to photography the power he had already annexed for print Willems, ‘Between Panoramic and
Sequential: Nadar and the Serial Image’,
in the self-aggrandising Panthéon Nadar: the power to recognise the great men of
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 11:3
his time, and to become great himself by association. (Autumn 2012), figure 16 [no page num-
Those familiar with historical and artistic developments in France will recog- bers]. Available at http://www.19thc-art
nise a thick chain of referentiality in Nadar’s caption. The dedication of the worldwide.org/index.php/autumn12/will
ems-nadar-and-the-serial-image (accessed 5
Pantheon building was a palimpsest that reflected the ongoing political upheavals July 2015). Willems discusses the Réac series
of the nineteenth century. Signalling disunity and a crisis of memory, each regime at length, contextualising the forms of gra-
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repurposed the building and revised the decorations of the pediment and dome. In phic narrative and sequential art pioneered
the mid-1850s when Nadar made his montage, Napoleon III had reinstated in the short-lived Revue comique, which ran
from November 1848 to December 1849
Catholic symbols, stripping away figural representations of the Fatherland,
with Nadar as editor, columnist, and
Liberty, and Renown, along with the dedication to the nation’s great men.55 illustrator.
Nadar’s caption thus rebuked the Napoleonic pretender; he countered with his 54 – The grammar is ambiguous: ‘au grand
own pretentious act of substitution and opposing conceptions of the republic and homme, le daguerreotype instantané
reconnaissant’.
greatness. The motto was also laden with allusions to art and journalism. Nadar
55 – The original Catholic church was
borrowed the concept from an influential predecessor, Benjamin Roubaud, who adorned with a cross and angels on the
inaugurated his gallery of one hundred portrait-charges, the Panthéon charivarique pediment, a Latin inscription on the frieze,
(1838–39), with an impudent self-portrait. Roubaud could be seen drawing his and a cross atop the dome. After 1791, the
pediment sculpture depicted the Fatherland
caricatures directly on the masonry of the Pantheon building, which bears the
(La Patrie) crowning Virtue, and Liberty
modified inscription: ‘aux grands hommes, la charge reconnaissable’ (to the great crushing Despotism; the frieze was inscribed
men, a recognisable caricature). Two of the prominent journalistic puffs for the ‘aux grands hommes la patrie reconnais-
Panthéon Nadar (published by friends and probably worded by Nadar himself) had sante’; a statue of Renown surmounted the
already played with this aphoristic lineage. In June 1853 Philipon tipped his hat ‘to dome. The Catholic symbols and Latin
inscription returned in the Restoration. In
the great Nadar, [whom] the Fatherland recognises’, and a column in L’Illustration the July Monarchy, David d’Angers made a
(March 1854) reiterated Nadar’s service ‘to the great men, [who] caricature new pediment sculpture of the Fatherland
recognises’.56 It was only a small step from here to the 1855 montage and its distributing crowns from Liberty to great
dedication ‘to the great man, [who] the daguerreotype recognises’. men; the inscription ‘aux grands hommes’
was reinstated; a tricolour flag flew atop the
Nadar’s caption plays on several levels. It announces he will continue the dome. Napoleon III reverted the building to
caricatural enterprise of his Panthéon by other means, and that he sees photography a church again: the inscription was removed
as a powerful tool for erecting modern monuments, for creating renown that is from 1851 to 1885, and the flag replaced by
both instant and enduring. It is the perfect medium for a shameless self-promoter a cross in 1852. See Mona Ozouf, ‘The
Pantheon: The École Normale of the Dead’,
like Nadar, who knows how to put himself in the picture, to absorb the qualities of in Realms of Memory: The Construction of
other characters, and to create the story of his times. Furthermore, this particular the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 3, New
grand homme should be recognised doubly, for he is not only great in his cultural York: Columbia University Press 1998,
achievements, but also large in stature. Thanks to his notoriety as a living caricature 325–46.
56 – Philipon’s advance puff in Journal pour
and ubiquitous fixture of the Parisian social scene, Nadar can also be recognised by rire (4 June 1853): ‘Au grand Nadar, la Patrie
his tall frame and lanky legs: he had a physical signature that went hand in hand reconnaissante!’ The réclame by Philippe
with the graphic and autographic ones. Busoni in L’Illustration (25 March 1854): ‘Le
Panthéon Nadar, – aux grands hommes la
caricature reconnaissante – est la silhouette
Montage Techniques and Contexts bouffonne des écrivains contemporains’.
Quoted in Prinet and Dilasser, Nadar, 78–79.
How was the montage self-portrait constructed? In the absence of documentation, I
base my hypotheses on visual evidence. Happily, I have discovered a photograph
that I believe to be Nadar’s source image: a full-length portrait of the artist seated in
a chair and holding a cigar (figure 10). On close examination the similarities and
departures are striking, and revealing of how Nadar must have proceeded. First he
posed for this camera portrait, producing an unusually sombre result: the body
language exudes bohemian informality but his face is uncharacteristically lifeless –

120

Figure 10. Nadar, Self-Portrait, salted paper
print, 1854–60. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. RMN-
Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
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57 – To mask the plate he could have used
opaquing pigment (black varnish or ink) or
dark paper, applied to the non-image side of
the glass. See the helpful technical glossary
in Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated
Photography Before Photoshop, New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press and New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art 2012, 270–73.
58 – This step could be achieved by drawing
on either the negative or the positive.
59 – Perhaps one of these portraits inspired the
other. They were made at roughly the same
time, and they both use the imaginary confla-
tion of cigar and crayon to suggest the appari-
tion of caricature within the photographic
portrait.
Nadar’s Signatures
perfect fodder for an experiment. He would extract collage elements from an
unadulterated print of this negative (print A). Then, returning to the glass negative,
he masked most of the plate to produce a modified paper positive.57 The mask
covered the entire lower body, left arm, and background, leaving visible the head,
torso to the hips, and right arm. When printed, only this truncated bust – floating
free and placed at an angle in the top left corner – appeared on the new positive
(print B). Now he could create a new composition around the bust. He cut out three
photographic fragments from print A to embellish composition B: the extracted left
arm was inserted at an exultant angle; his right foot was severed at mid-shin; and
the lower left leg was removed just below the knee. His crayon or brush could then
complete the transplant surgery: adjusting the join of the sleeve to the torso, and
blacking in elongated thighs and spidery joints to connect the hips to the lower legs
and feet. He also redrew the eyes – converting lazy lids to the more familiar
animated stare – and carefully added strands of hair to make a more savage mane.58
There was no need to embellish the object in his left hand: the change of angle and
context suffice to effect the transmutation from cigar to drawing implement
(creating an intriguing double of Philipon’s portrait).59 The figure was complete.
Below it, he drew in the porte-crayon, and added an additional paper rectangle
bearing the handwritten caption. Finally, Nadar re-photographed this hybrid com-
position (with its mixed-media elements graphic, photographic, and autographic) to
produce a new negative that would be entirely photographic and could thus
produce any number of identical positives. He made a masked print, a collage,
and then a contretype.
These techniques were highly experimental, but not unprecedented.
Contretypes were common in this era because this was the only way to multiply
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 Jillian Lerner

and disseminate daguerreotypes (unique positive images on metal substrate). We

know Nadar was familiar with this technique because he helped produce a con-
tretype of the only known daguerreotype portrait of Honoré de Balzac, also in
1855.60 Perhaps this assignment gave Nadar the idea to experiment with re-photo- 60 – Sometime in 1854 or 1855 the editor
Dutacq asked Nadar (aided by Adrien) to
graphing his own work.
produce new prints from a glass negative
There were several other examples of manipulated photography and combina- made by Gustave Le Gray after an original
tion printing among French colleagues in the early 1850s. It was common practice daguerreotype portrait of Balzac. Chotard,
to retouch negatives with brushes and ink before printing. Charles Nègre used Nadar: Caricatures et photographies, 26.
61 – Working on the negative of Chimney
extensive handwork on the negative to enhance painterly effects in his images.61
Sweeps Walking, Nègre enhanced highlights
Edouard Baldus made elaborate synthetic compositions, suturing together multiple and blurred the background buildings. See
paper negatives to achieve variable levels of exposure or focus, as in Cloister of Mary Warner Marien, ‘Charles Nègre:
Saint-Trophime, Arles, 1851. Hippolyte Bayard and Gustave Le Gray used combi- Chimney Sweeps Walking, 1852’, in
Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable
nation printing to improve tonality in landscape images: a single positive could be
Photographs, ed. Sophie Howarth, London:
printed from two masked negatives, one for the land or sea, and another for the Tate Publishing 2005, 25–31.
sky.62 Le Gray supposedly kept his technique secret, but Nadar may have learned of 62 – See Fineman, Faking It, 45–49.
it from his brother Adrien who had studied with Le Gray. Or he could have read 63 – Francis Wey, ‘Des progrès et de l’avenir de
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about it in La Lumière: Francis Wey described the technique of combination
printing for landscapes in an 1851 article ‘On the Progress and Future of
Photography’.63
Now we have a good sense of why and how Nadar made his experimental
montage in 1855, when he sought to project his prior expertise in caricature and
publicity into the field of photography. He created a new composite of these
domains that was manifest in form, concept, and professional reality. But this still
leaves a few key questions to consider.
Why was this work not featured more prominently, either at the time of
production or subsequently? There is no evidence that the montage self-portrait
was exhibited in the nineteenth century. My best guess is that Nadar displayed the
work in his studio. We know from photographs and written accounts that his
reception rooms held an impressive display of his own framed works – photo-
graphs, portrait-charges, the Panthéon – alongside a host of other prints, paintings,
porcelains, and visual curiosities.64 Perhaps the montage belonged to the atelier’s
‘permanent exhibition and sale of the collection Nadar (Contemporary Figures)’ as
boasted in one advertisement.65 It is also possible that he sent the work to one of
the public exhibitions in which he participated.66
Two twentieth-century exhibitions of the montage self-portrait are documen-
ted: the Getty Museum’s salted paper print was shown in 1978 at the Leland
Stanford Museum,67 and a modern print from the contretype negative belonging
to the Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites (CNMHS) was
exhibited at the Maison de Balzac in 1990.68 Why this exhibition history is so
thin is a mystery, given how much Nadar’s work has been studied and canonised.
But then, for most of the twentieth century the history of photography had a
formalist bias that side-lined ‘impure’ practices of pictorialism, amateurism, and
manipulated photography. Not so surprising, then, that Nadar’s most hybrid
images – along with his belittled early career as a ‘hack’ writer and ‘jobbing’
illustrator69 – have been overlooked by narrators who seek to valorise his photo-
graphic art.70
Why did Nadar not pursue this montage technique in other works of portrai-
ture? Perhaps it was conceived as a one-off experiment, a publicity stunt, or a
concept piece as the charged photographs of Commerson and Philipon and the
revolving portraits of Nadar and Arosa seem to be (although interestingly there are
two of each of these). Perhaps Nadar abandoned the approach because he found it
unsuccessful: too disjunctive aesthetically, too difficult and time-consuming to
produce, or too fantastic and unseemly to be marketed to other sitters. It does
seem less than optimally aligned with the signature he soon devised for his portrait
photography: the aesthetic he was going for was rarefied and spiritual, the resem-
blance intimate and earnest, the framing austere. Reducing the noise of backdrops,
la photographie’, La Lumière (5 October 1851),
128.
64 – One entire wall of the Capucines studio
was devoted to the Panthéon Nadar. Interior
views of the studio (FOL-EO-15 (1)) can be
consulted online courtesy of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France Gallica.
65 – Nadar’s paid advertisement in Revue
européenne. Lettres, sciences, arts, voyages,
politique, 3e année, tome XVI (1861).
66 – Baldwin and Keller propose a similar
display strategy for the 1855 self-portrait (figure
4): ‘Of the many self-portraits of a man who
continually reinvented himself, this alone is
signed and bears the address of his studio,
indicating that he intended to use it to promote
himself as a photographer. [. . . It] may have
hung at the entrance to the rue Saint-Lazare
studio, but it may also have been intended for
display in one of the public exhibitions to which
Nadar sent work, like those of the Société
Française de Photographie’. Baldwin and
Keller, Nadar/Warhol, 128. Nadar exhibited
with the Société Française de Photographie in
Paris and Brussels in 1856, 1857, 1859, 1861,
and 1863. Nadar, ed. Hambourg, Heilbrun, and
Néagu, 260.
67 – Wagstaff’s collection file indicates that the
montage self-portrait was exhibited in ‘Nadar:
Portraits and Paris Catacombs’ at Stanford
University Museum of Art (now Cantor Arts
Center), 28 November 1978–14 January 1979
[no catalogue]. Wagstaff corresponded with
other curators eager to show his Nadar collec-
tion (at The Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco /Achenbach Foundation for Graphic
Arts and The Metropolitan Museum of Art),
but I cannot determine which of his works, if
any, were eventually shown. See Wagstaff
Correspondence, Box 88, Getty Research
Institute. In all likelihood, conservation issues
have prevented more recent exhibitions of the
Getty’s salted paper print. In an email to the
author (May 2016), conservators in the Getty’s
Department of Photographs report that the
current condition of the print is ‘very fragile’,
‘chemically unstable and only viewable under
special circumstances [. . .] most likely due to
excessive exposure to light and acidity [. . .] at
some point during its history’.

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68 – The exhibition ‘Nadar. Caricatures et
photographies’ ran from 13 November 1990
to 17 February 1991 at the Maison de
Balzac, Paris. The accompanying catalogue
by Loïc Chotard, Nadar: Caricatures et
photographies, is superlative.
69 – Descriptions of Nadar’s early career are
often dismissive, even in cases where critics
acknowledge the influence of caricature on
his photographic practices. For example,
Roger Cardinal refers to Nadar’s stint as a
‘jobbing’ and ‘entirely untutored draughts-
man’ who ‘seems to have drifted into this
pursuit’. Cardinal, ‘Nadar and the
Photographic Portrait’, 7 and 9.
70 – Nadar colluded in this purification
attempt. Looking back in Quand j’étais
photographe (1900), he mocked retouching,
and declared that photography should shrug
off all infidelities and disguises. See Peeters,
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Les Métamorphoses de Nadar, 58 and 63.
71 – Peeters described this quest in a cap-
tion to the montage self-portrait: ‘Le lien
avec l’activité de caricaturiste de Nadar est
évident. Mais Nadar, dans sa quête d’une
pureté photographique et d’une vérité du
visage, ne tardera pas à se détacher des effets
trop faciles. Même dans cette image d’ail-
leurs, ce sont les jambes, non la face, qui
sont l’objet de la déformation’. Ibid., 42.
72 – ‘In 1861, for the first time in his
photographic career, Nadar registered
images – primarily portrait cartes of celeb-
rities – for public sale’. McCauley, Industrial
Madness, 143–44. On the carte-de-visite
form in general, see McCauley’s other
excellent book, Elizabeth Anne McCauley,
A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite
Portrait Photograph, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press 1985.
73 – The selection includes a cropped ver-
sion of the Philipon portrait in figure 9.
74 – Alongside the forty-three camera por-
traits are two caricatures of Napoleon
Sarony, an American graphic artist and
publisher of lithographs. Among the attri-
butes pictured by Nadar are Sarony’s signa-
ture red Fez and a porte-crayon. I believe
these portrait-charges were drawn from Les
Contemporains de Nadar, another rework-
ing of his portrait archive, published in
Journal amusant between 23 October 1858
and 16 August 1862. See Chotard, Nadar:
Caricatures et photographies, 104–05.
Nadar’s Signatures
furnishings, and fashionable attire that cluttered the full-figure poses of rival
studios, Nadar zoomed in on his sitters’ faces. Because his premium full-plate prints
(25 cm × 19 cm) were ‘life-size’ they staged an intense tête-à-tête between sitter and
viewer. The comic exaggerations and additive textures of the montage self-portrait
were out of step with this intimate communion; with Nadar’s ‘quest for photo-
graphic purity and a truth of the face’;71 with Nadar’s claim to be a soulful auteur
rather than a technician with a box of cheap tricks. Furthermore, they were
probably unsuited to the desires of distinguished sitters. In other words, the direct
camera portraits were better adapted to both aesthetic discourse and the running of
a commercial studio.
Nadar’s austere approach to portraiture complemented the intellectual, bohe-
mian, and antimaterialist disposition of his famous sitters. In the early years these
friends made up the bulk of his clientele. He offered them reduced prices for print
orders, while securing for himself the rights to retain the negatives and control
further dissemination. Thus Nadar accumulated a photographic ‘image bank’ of
Contemporary Figures that he could exploit in a number of ways. He sold prints to
publishers, for use as the basis of illustrations in journals and books (reproduced for
print publication in wood engraving). After 1861, he also sold celebrity portraits to
anonymous buyers off the street, in the commercially optimised form of cartes de
visite. At first reluctant to embrace this small, cheap, mass-producible format
invented by his rival André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Nadar eventually decided to
cash in on the public’s mania for celebrity cartes, which all manner of citizens
avidly collected and arranged in albums alongside portraits of relatives and
friends.72
This traffic in celebrity images was the impetus for one of Nadar’s other
recourses to montage. He re-photographed an array of carte-de-visite portraits to
create an advertising placard (figure 11). A wooden board or table top forms the
substrate upon which forty-five cartes (each approximately 10 cm × 6.5 cm) are
arranged in neat rows and held in place with thumb tacks. Nadar’s stamped
signature appears at the bottom of each carte, alongside an inventory number
and the sitter’s name. The hand-lettered title announces portraits of painters and
draughtsmen for sale in the Editions Nadar, including the likes of Gustave Courbet
(three times), Edouard Manet (four times), Jean-François Millet, Horace Vernet,
Charles Philipon, and Henry Monnier (twice), Constantin Guys (twice), Gustave
Doré (three times), and Honoré Daumier (three times). For some sitters there is a
choice of portraits, in alternate poses or simply selective enlargements of the same
pose.73 These close-cropped versions re-focus attention on the sitter’s face (a
Nadarian signature), compensating for the diminutive carte-de-visite format.
There are several layers of photographic reproduction at work here. The images
gathered in this advertising display were already miniature reproductions of works
in Nadar’s inventory: he used a carte-de-visite camera to re-photograph his large
format portraits from the late 1850s, and some of his graphic portrait-charges as
well.74 The inclusion of two caricatures amongst the forty-three photographic
portraits in the placard is further evidence of Nadar’s fluid understanding of
these media, and his desire to continue exploiting his existing portrait archive.
The placard could be hung in his studio window or reception rooms, so that
customers could peruse a selection of portraits available for purchase or printing
on request. Nadar’s decision to re-photograph the thumb-tacked ensemble – to
create a photomontage – meant it could be printed on a sheet of paper (19.5 cm ×
21 cm), potentially multiplied, and circulated as a poster or broadsheet
advertisement.
With this in mind we can start to draw some conclusions about Nadar’s
approach to montage. In 1855 Nadar used montage to combine photographic
and graphic elements, to make a charged self-portrait that reconciles several layers
of his biography, public image, past work, and professional expertise. Subsequently,
he used montage only as a means to re-present a number of existing works side by
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Figure 11. Nadar, Edition Nadar: Painters and Draughtsmen (advertising placard), albumen print, 1860–70. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

side. With the advertising placard, montage serves to present an assortment of

products for sale – in this case both caricatures and photographic portraits of
celebrities. Inviting visual scanning and comparison, consumer selection, and the
urge to collect, it is an exercise in publicity and communications design in which
practical and commercial motives are paramount. In contrast to the playful and
imaginative dimensions of the 1855 portrait, the composition of the placard is fairly
artless.
What can these examples tell us about the concepts and uses of montage in the
nineteenth century? Nadar’s approach is radically different from the tactics of
rupture, destabilisation, and détournement that govern montage aesthetics in the
early twentieth century. Nadar uses montage to assemble photographic materials
into coherent and unified representations. Furthermore, his montaged grids betray
an effort at standardisation, in the making and formatting of the constituent images
and in the orderly layout of discrete rectangular units within a single rectangular
display. Although he was a fervent republican enduring an imperial regime, Nadar

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75 – While it might whisper a reminder of
Nadar’s political sentiment (to viewers
attuned to the echo of M. Réac), the mon-
tage self-portrait is not subversive in its
intent, pictorial strategies, or methods of
display.
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Nadar’s Signatures
did not make political montage.75 There is no sedition here, neither violence, nor
unmasking, nor derision. There are traces of deformation and denaturing in the
1855 montage, but they serve to stabilise and unify the identity of the author/sitter.
Tellingly, the distortions of the caricaturist create a more familiar and congenial
likeness than the one recorded in the unmanipulated source photograph (figure 10),
which seems ugly, uncharacteristic, and unnatural by contrast. Perhaps most sig-
nificantly, Nadar did not weaponise or subvert source materials pilfered from the
mass media. Instead he deployed montage to improve the packaging of his own
products, and he did his utmost to become a mediated personage and a prominent
producer of popular media. He hoped to expand and exploit the available media,
rather than undermine them.
The issue of technical reproducibility is key here. Essentially, Nadar used
montage to photograph his drawings and photographs with an eye to their pre-
servation and wider dissemination. The scarcity of such attempts admits that
photography was not yet the best medium for achieving those ends. In the
twentieth century, photographic images in the print media were the main delivery
method for all manner of consumer bombardments, and thus avant-garde artists
found value in disrupting and repurposing those ubiquitous mass-media elements
through montage. By contrast, in Nadar’s time there was no such image glut or
fatigue: novelty and desire still clung to the photograph, and the popularisation of
images was still a work in progress. In the 1850s and 1860s, photographs would
have to be translated through the skills of illustrators and printmakers to be
broadcast in the press, or they would have to reach their public through a retail
environment, as physical products to be displayed, publicised, and moved like other
goods. For the 1855 montage to be published, the composition would have to be
redrawn in lithography or wood engraving and circulated as an illustration. But of
course this act of translation would erase all of the meaningful layering, the
mechanical and autographic juxtapositions, in this unique self-portrait.
Each of Nadar’s hybrid images investigates an aesthetic and technical
threshold: between caricature and photography; photography and sculpture; the
carte-de-visite portrait and the poster. (With Nadar it was always ‘and’ rather than
‘or’.) These images are formal experiments and advertisements for their maker,
modes of creation, self-invention, and passionate self-promotion. Nadar’s work is a
fascinating case study of montage before the historical avant-garde because it insists
on the inseparability of artistic, journalistic, and commercial endeavour. Where
would one place Nadar with respect to avant-garde and mass culture? He clearly
belongs to both and to neither; he makes the terms seem inapt. We do not know
whether the montage self-portrait was circulated as art or publicity or not at all. Yet
it exhibits qualities that are equally prized in advanced art and in the marketplace:
formal experimentation, novelty, defiance of convention, strategic market position-
ing, the building of signature styles and brands, the ability to remake one’s image, to
imagine otherwise, to project oneself into and shape the future. Nadar was parti-
cularly adept at redrawing his identity, aligning his persona, ideas, and products
until they became legible as a coherent signature, especially at pivotal moments
when these elements were newly incoherent and seemingly incompatible with what
had come before. He was the consummate artist and the consummate entrepreneur:
an infinitely adaptable character, and still, somehow, always himself.
125