[View in the Catacombs]

Getty Museum

[View in the Catacombs]

Creator

Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon]

French Photographer · 1820–1910

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MakerLithographerEngraver

> 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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Object Description · Getty Museum

"[O]ne of those places that everyone wants to see and no one wants to see again" is how Nadar described the catacombs. The Paris catacombs were former underground quarries that were refitted to house skeletons. Nadar ventured into them to create an unprecedented series of photographs illuminated by flashlight. He used a magnesium lamp, visible in the lower right corner of the image. Six or seven million skeletons were interred in the catacombs; in this photograph, seemingly every one is accounted for. Only sixteen carefully stacked protruding skulls on the wall are clearly distinguishable at left, yet they are all that is needed to indicate what the blackened squares in the distance represent. Around the time that Nadar made this series of a hundred photographs in the catacombs, two of his beloved friends passed away. The photographer may have been exploring his own mortality when he embarked upon this series, but it was also a fashionable pursuit to descend into these macabre depths. In mid-nineteenth century Paris, there were four annual visiting days for the catacombs, at which time they were filled with curious onlookers.

Getty Museum’s catalogue record

produced_by.carried_out_by[0].id
https://data.getty.edu/museum/collection/person/9ac72351-97b7-499a-b01f-4ad920e5de96
Artist/Maker
Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon]
subject_of[Homepage].id
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/10459Q
Date
1861
Medium
Albumen silver print
Culture
French
Object Type
Print

Taken from LinkedCulture’s stored copy of Getty Museum’s record. A fresh capture of the museum’s own record has not been made for this object yet.

From LinkedCulture

In 1861, Nadar descended into the Paris catacombs with a magnesium lamp and made photographs in a place that had never been lit for a camera before. That lamp is just visible at the lower right of the frame, casting light on a tunnel wall lined with bones and sixteen stacked skulls, with darker corridors of the same arrangement receding into the background. Nadar had recently lost two close friends when he made this series of one hundred underground images, and that grief may be impossible to separate from what you are looking at.

Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.

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Open this page QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.Ocq91ZAfd0r1Ll3C.GjiabfJJr_goikxvTFdhoqCQ8NpYOpNv0wOb8Mbd62XPxnPdo7sT5yW1fwTZvc3DXBOFme5LxwdzolAtj1retlqpE-EPwxWl0Xc_gY04OCkqZmnKxUBUuXvEteI2jcJzfXWov9To3ClIqQb-3P1Fw7TZ-y51ti_tFZszDy72oOP5fpMjfxyf5UROfUxEnYFjsXNuTvwS0ikxnEHOb5CsIImojBXnoT2wfKnHz6wjU2_u9vXA3Tjmj3Ka8Qs27yPruqNx2l1v7n3WOP2t1QUa-10sEKGmLdDTwv6e7r4oH5VX1WqKNjOSTiDGXyw_yi4jtMihljXP9bGIozCMOpzs69QneThVQ-PMmMlvJ9LeGR76PVU2Nl8CuOw_CH6OJAxHPfewFGWqVzAFlJp4dkUqSee at Getty Museum QR destination: https://linkedculture.org/q/q1.Uh5K2D85ZJEyp7HN.25eivWw1QGP7pSLMuzFeMtX1d7Rg1YLZmqLRwjKJRQ8LslSX4fk7hGIEYttGdOubQ46hNG_bVnhCUUxjFXj1gVLHiN0yjpB34z7ZRaAyoK-Bg2c0AYEGITesrgCV-AXsp4dWAt3kkp7yUfRGR0d40r2arMjeVMQMbhcWQI9nBoKJxhl1QhW49_R7LYokt3PRyMz1QA5L04M_zL6DzIYuHRyh_2ianauOzB5euJiZBYtM62I1On4YirQcr8a83V6ZgRLX0qrca20LZhrXMEYxSKV-7Y42kw-PLaIAHYhqT4HuUfm39PqjAQkl_sUIMH7YokDXKVQHBaAyadpIPLiat_hOpHsTKUPfGXItdW2kHD94uTBmBLXXB_i-ZU8
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Object ID
fe75044e-70f3-40b1-bb18-02fa69f37ed7
Object Type
Print
  • Getty Museum field “Object Type” · copied as is
Creator
Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon]
  • Getty Museum field “Artist/Maker” · copied as is
Culture
French
  • Getty Museum field “Culture” · copied as is
Medium
Albumen silver print
  • Getty Museum field “Medium” · copied as is
Department
Photographs
  • Getty Museum field “Department” · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field · Getty's classification category is stored as department.
Credit Line
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
  • Getty Museum field “Standard Credit Line” · the first available of several museum fields
  • Getty Museum field “Source Credit Line” · the first available of several museum fields
Date
1861
  • Getty Museum field “Date” · copied as is
Begin Year
1861
  • Getty Museum field “produced_by.timespan.begin_of_the_begin” · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field
End Year
1861
  • Getty Museum field “produced_by.timespan.end_of_the_end” · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field

The museum’s own record has not been captured for this object yet, so the museum fields shown above are limited to values LinkedCulture stored unchanged.

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[View in the Catacombs]

Oct 23, 2026 · Short

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