A few pictures have come to represent Félix Nadar’s work: Charles Baudelaire, undated, but probably between 1855 and 1862, standing in his elegant dark coat, half-unbuttoned waistcoat and bow tie, hands in pockets, staring back at the camera – defiant perhaps, but with the mouth and the eyes, which Nadar called ‘two drops of coffee’, betraying some vulnerability. Victor Hugo, side-on, avuncular, or on his deathbed; a glacial Eugène Delacroix; the incredibly joyless Goncourt brothers; a series of portraits of George Sand, who went to Nadar in desperation after a competitor had captured with great vividness her drooping mouth and double chin. The image was ‘making everyone scream’, Sand wrote to Nadar.
The Great Nadar: The Man behind the Camera by Adam Begley. For all Félix Nadar’s gifts with the camera, his interests constantly flitted elsewhere. He was, in the words of his friend Jules Verne, ‘enamoured of the impossible’.