[Self-portrait in smock Félix Nadar]

Getty Museum

[Self-portrait in smock Félix Nadar]

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
1855–1857
Medium
Salted paper print
Culture
French
Department
Photographs
Institution
Getty Museum

For a photographer so gifted in drawing out the essential traits of his sitters, Nadar seems determined here to create a particularly serious presentation of himself. The result is uncharacteristically stiff and inexpressive. His arms are folded and his hands lost in the folds of his sleeves as if he were bound up in a straight jacket. Although by this time Nadar was an entrepreneur, his clothes present an informal combination of disparate elements in keeping with his self-image as an artist and Bohemian. He wears a silk tie so askew as to appear barely tied at all and a white shirt with a loose-fitting spread collar. His long, loose fashionable coat resembles a painter's smock, perhaps a self-referential nod to his occupation.

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