Pierre Detrez

Nadar was originally a caricaturist, best known for his Panthéon Nadar, a lithographic depiction of several hundred members of the French intelligentsia. This project introduced him to photography, as he drew some of his caricatures from photographs. Nadar learned photography alongside his brother, Adrien Tournachon, but soon opened up his own studio, which became a fashionable nineteenth-century intellectual salon. Nadar became known for his portraits of French intellectual, literary, and artistic figures, like this one of the art critic Pierre Detrez. In 1859, the critic Phillippe Burty wrote, “[Nadar’s] portraits are works of art in every accepted sense of the word…if photography is by no means a complete art the photographer always has the right to be an artist.” Indeed, Nadar prided himself on his artistic appreciation of the effects of light in conceptualizing his portraits and posing his sitters, but like other early artist-turned-photographers, he neither produced nor developed his own images.