Alph[onse] Daudet

Getty Museum

Alph[onse] Daudet

Creator

Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon]

French Photographer · 1820–1910

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> The sun is only the practitioner, M[r]. Nadar is the artist who wants to give him some work. So wrote a critic of Gaspard Félix Tournachon in 1859. Tournachon's nickname, Nadar, derived from youthful slang, but became his professional signature and the name by which he is best known today. Poor but talented, Nadar began by scratching out a living as a freelance writer and caricaturist. His writi

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Date
around 1860
Medium
Salted paper print
Culture
French
Department
Photographs
Institution
Getty Museum

The dreamily romantic and physically frail Alphonse Daudet sat for Nadar in the early 1860s, soon after beginning his career as a poet, playwright, and writer of fiction. In Nadar's portrait, Daudet directed his intense gaze to some farther part of the studio. His pose seems wholly unassuming, his right hand toying with the chair fringe. The apparent informality of the pose was not accidental but the result of Nadar's intention to show the modesty of a very young poet of amiable temperament and humble demeanor. Nadar arranged the light so it would fall from the upper left, crisply delineating the smooth lines of Daudet's forehead and cheek and so illuminating his hair as to turn its color from black to brown.

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