Nadar

France • 1820−1910

Biography and information

Nadar (FR. Nadar; real name was Gaspard Felix Tournaschon, FR. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon; 6 April 1820 — 21 March 1910) was a famous French photographer, caricaturist, novelist and balloonist.

Nadar was born in Paris in 1820. In 1853 he began to take his first photographs, in 1858 made the first photograph from the air, rising over Paris in a balloon. They made photographs of Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Sarah Bernhardt, Ernest Shackleton and others.

Extraordinary reputation Nadar's photographic process was facilitated by the fact that, at the request of the great French artist Ingres classicist he shot everyone whose photo I wanted to be an artist. According to his biographer, E. de Mirecourt, Ingres painted his beautiful portraits on these photos, not feeling the need that he posed. Artists called Nadar "by Titian photos".

Nadar turned to the camera through the theatre — he was a theater playwright. As an artist, he was a respected portraitist. As a journalist, he worked with Daumier as a cartoonist in the magazine "Charivari". In 1850, at the age of thirty years She was the darling of the boulevards, famous for his wit, but neither theatre nor art salon or the magazine didn't give him enough money to live. Opposed to photos like most other artists, he nevertheless became co-owner of the Studio of his brother Adrien in 1852, but this partnership soon ended in litigation.

In 1854, Nadar had published "panthéon Nadar", a huge lithograph, made up of 240 cartoons, the first of four planned collections. He came to the same thought as David Octavius hill at the time, first to photograph their clients, and then to draw cartoons. But in solid volumes of "the Gallery of contemporaries" appeared not caricatures, and excellent reproductions of portraits of writers and other famous people made with excellent reproductions of the original photographs of Nadar.

Died March 21, 1910, is buried in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise.