Getty Museum
Supérieure, Petites Sœurs des Pauvres
Creator
Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon]French Photographer · 1820–1910
All works by this person →> 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
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1860–1865
- Medium
- Albumen silver print
- Culture
- French
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Mother Superior Marie Jamet's steady expression combines sad-eyed benevolence and sweetness. A halo of white surrounds and isolates her moon-shaped face from the dark sky of her hooded habit. Nadar was emphatically not religious, and scholars do not know how he came to photograph this nun. She was probably photographed because she was believed to be the founder of an order of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who were dedicated to the care of destitute elderly persons. Outside his normal range of literary society sitters, Mother Jamet may have been intrigued by Nadar's reputation as a portraitist.
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