[PHOTOGRAPHIE] Portrait photographique de Jules Verne

Original albumen photograph of Jules Verne in profile, in carte-de-visite format, mounted on the heavy card stock of the Nadar studio, 51 rue d'Anjou-Saint-Honoré, Paris. Early pen inscription on the verso identifying Jules Verne, printed advertising matter for the studio including the statement “Gold Medal, Universal Exhibition 1878”, and blue stamp “J. Kuhn, Paris”. Card with rounded corners; very slight wear to one corner, otherwise without significant defect.

The Nadar mount, whose advertising records the gold medal awarded at the 1878 Universal Exhibition, establishes a date after 1878 for this print. The Bibliothèque nationale de France preserves several portraits of Jules Verne in the studio's reference albums, catalogued under numbers 3436 and 3437 and broadly dated between 1875 and 1895.

Jules Verne and Nadar had known one another since the early 1860s, when the photographer embarked upon his celebrated campaign in support of heavier-than-air flight. When Nadar founded the Société d'encouragement de la navigation aérienne au moyen du plus lourd que l'air in 1863, Verne was among the dozen or so figures associated with it; a surviving sheet of the Society's letterhead in the Jules Verne collections at Nantes expressly lists him among its censors. In the same year Verne published “Nadar the Aeronaut” in the Musée des Familles, while Nadar constructed the Géant, the enormous balloon whose first ascent took place that October.

Their association soon passed from aeronautics into fiction. In From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, Verne gave the French adventurer Michel Ardan a surname formed as an anagram of Nadar; the character would return in Around the Moon. His physical description extends the tribute by borrowing several traits from the photographer's famously exuberant personality: “He was a man of forty-two, tall, though already somewhat stooped, like those caryatids that bear balconies upon their shoulders. His powerful head, a veritable lion's mask, would from time to time toss a mass of fiery hair that formed a true mane.” By the rearrangement of a few letters, Verne's aeronaut friend had entered the world of the Voyages extraordinaires.

By the time this carte de visite was printed, after 1878, Verne was already the author of Around the World in Eighty Days, Michael Strogoff, Hector Servadac, and The Fifteen-Year-Old Captain; Nadar, whose name had become that of a Verne hero thirteen years earlier, now fixed the writer's own likeness.

This portrait thus brings together, within a single object, the personal and intellectual relationship between two men brought close by the aeronautical experiments of the 1860s: the Nadar studio here photographs the writer who, in the figure of Michel Ardan, had already brought his friend into fiction.