Portrait photographique d'Auguste Rodin

Original albumen print photograph of Auguste Rodin, cabinet card format, mounted on stiff card. Nadar's signature in red in the lower margin. Advertisements in red on the verso. A small white area in the upper left margin, with a few imperfections from the glass plate in the same area, not affecting the portrait. Foxing to the margins.

Iconic portrait of the sculptor with close-cropped hair and pince-nez, staring fixedly into the lens.

This snapshot gathers every hallmark of the celebrated "style Nadar," whose stark, unadorned clarity establishes his gallery of portraits as one of the most compelling of the nineteenth century. The Nadar collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the few surviving trial prints of the Rodin portraits (the present portrait appears under number 9115 B of volume 39). Rodin appears to have sat for the photographer only once, on which occasion four exposures were taken in total. The sitting is usually dated to 1891 — by which time Félix Nadar had retired from active business to devote himself to his aeronautical projects, though he is known to have continued sporadically producing portraits of established artists and literary figures. This is far removed from the "commercial" style often attributed to his son Paul, who took over the running of the studio in 1886. This "spartiate" approach (to use Ulrich Keller's expression) corresponds far more closely to Félix's own manner. The Musée Rodin, which holds a print of this portrait, attributes the negative to him: a letter from Rodin, sent to the Ermitage de Sénart where Félix was then residing, confirms this attribution: "et puis des remerciements encore pour autres choses, des portraits de votre serviteur" (lettre du 18 septembre 1892).

The present print dates from the late 1920s, as indicated by the studio stamp, the studio then being located in the former Léon Bonnat atelier at 48, rue Bassano. In reference to Félix's earlier profession, the stamp on the print reads "Panthéon Nadar," after the celebrated gallery of hundreds of celebrity caricatures assembled into a panoramic composition, the first sheet of which Nadar published in 1854. He had planned to issue four lithographed sheets, each presenting a serpentine procession of a thousand figures drawn from the ranks of noted "gens de lettres, auteurs dramatiques, peintres et sculpteurs, musiciens." It was this aborted, titanic undertaking that turned him toward photography, in which he would become one of the most gifted practitioners of the nineteenth century.

Sculptor and photographer also collaborated during this same period on a major undertaking: when Rodin received the commission for a monument to Balzac in 1891, Nadar placed his entire archive at his disposal: most notably the sole surviving daguerreotype portrait of Balzac, taken by Bisson in 1842, which the sculptor regarded as the "seule effigie fidèle et vraiment ressemblante de l'écrivain." The letter quoted above bears witness to a further project as well, for a Baudelaire portrait.

A superb portrait of the master of sculpture by the master of nineteenth-century photography.