Nadar’s Livre d’or
Adam Begley interviews Ali Smith in our new Summer issue. Begley’s new book, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera—a biography of the fabled Parisian photographer Félix Nadar—is out this month. The book’s appendix takes a closer look at one of Nadar’s most treasured mementos.
The book, the size of a large photo album, has been disassembled, its two hundred-odd pages cut out and placed each in its own transparent protective sheath. Detached, the leather-bound front cover, with Félix Nadar’s flamboyant signature stamped in the center in gold leaf, lies in a cardboard box looking scuffed and forlorn, like exiled royalty.
The album is a livre d’or, one of several guest books or autograph albums he kept in successive studios. If you came to sit for a portrait (or a caricature, in the early days on the rue Saint-Lazare), and if you were an artist or a celebrity or preferably both, he would pester you to sign and leave a memento: a quip, a sketch, a poem, a few bars of music. Most sitters complied. Many signed and left only a brief remark, if any; others spent hours over a drawing or a watercolor, leaving on the page work of impressive quality. Félix was very proud of his collection of autographs, each one a token of friendship or a link with an eminent individual.
This particular , an astonishing record of the rich cultural life of Paris during the Second Empire, is stored in a rare-book library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia? Suffering from one of his and his collection of art and antiques were shipped across the Atlantic and housed in the Evans Building, an imposing Tudor Revival edifice erected on the site of his ancestral home, in what is now the middle of the University of Pennsylvania campus. After languishing for decades in the Dental Medicine Library, the Nadar album was transferred in 1985 to the university’s rare books and manuscripts collection. About ten years ago it was taken apart and led away in fourteen cardboard storage boxes.
