In 1862, Japanese travelers arrived in Europe for the first time in 240 years. Their nation, isolated from the rest of the world for so long, was reluctantly opening to the outside world.

Imagine being a member of this group — 40 men, many of them samurai, venturing out into a world full of technologies and cultures with which they had minimal experience. Their job was twofold: to learn about some of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in the world and to slow the predatory opening of Japan that had begun with American warships’ arrival in 1854.

In Europe, these men from a country whose technological progress had largely been frozen in the 1600s dazzled at the inventions of the industrial age. When they visited France, the telegraph especially wowed them, as they marveled that messages could cross continents in minutes.

Then they went to experience another budding European technology at the photo studio of Nadar. The famous photographer memorialized a large group of young men from the embassy posing with their swords:

And the more senior leaders of the mission:

I wonder what these Japanese diplomats were thinking as they sat, so far from home, having their portraits taken with cutting-edge gadgets by this bohemian weirdo. But they were just doing what everybody who passed through Paris did. If you were an important person, you got your photo snapped at Nadar’s. And, more often than not, he captured something special.

In last week’s post, I looked at Nadar’s rise to prominence and general vibes there — if you missed it, check it out; the rest of this post will make more sense if you do:

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Charles Baudelaire didn’t have a word to describe the strange experience of being alive in the middle of the 19th century — “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” existence in growing cities amidst wild technological and cultural change. So he came up with a new one: “modernity.” Baudelaire’s poems often dealt with scandalous topics and were sometimes banned. Needless to say, he was a fixture in the avant-garde cultural scene despite often being broke and nearly homeless.

In 1855, as he dodged creditors, battled a laudanum addiction, and tried to keep his chronically poor health from flagging, he ended up at Nadar’s portrait studio. Nadar photographed him in his signature style — against a plain backdrop (most of Nadar’s competitors filled their frames with elaborate decoration) that let the personality of his subject speak volumes.

Baudelaire’s gaze, like his writing, was unnervingly direct:

But here he gazes out into the distance.

A few years later, after Baudelaire had succumbed to his various ailments, the painter Edouard Manet created an etching based on Nadar’s photo:

Manet was friends with Nadar. In 1862, Manet’s fame and notoriety were just peaking as he scandalized the Paris art world with his unconventional subject matter and techniques. One of the paintings he created that year was “Young Woman Reclining in Spanish Costume.” The model was a friend of Nadar’s, and Manet dedicated the canvas: "A mon ami Nadar, Manet."

The painter naturally visited Nadar’s studio fo a portrait; it captures an artist of fierce intelligence:

Nadar got to photograph his idols as well as his friends. By 1855, Alexander Dumas was well-established as one of France’s greatest living writers. As the author of books like The Three Musketeers, he had captured the imagination of countless young Frenchmen, including Nadar, whose father had published Dumas’ first writing and had hung a portrait of Dumas in his son’s room. Here, Dumas seems comfortable and full of life:

As I mentioned last week, Dumas was featured in Nadar’s “Pantheon” of the greatest French authors and artists. He shared those honors with George Sand, the feminist author whose personal life was as well-known as her writing. She and Nadar were close friends, and he photographed her often:

Perhaps the biggest name in Nadar’s Pantheon was Victor Hugo, the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. Hugo had inspired generations of Romantics and republicans and had, by the time Nadar photographed him in 1884, become a legendary figure in France. In this photo, aged 82, he gazes wearily past the camera.

As the great man died in 1885, Nadar was called in to take a deathbed photograph:

Soon after, Hugo would pass away. His funeral was attended by two million people.

The next year, Nadar captured another fading lion in the year of his death. Franz Liszt had captured hearts and imaginations as the most charismatic musical performer of the 1830s and 1840s — his concerts were compared to a “demon trying to play his soul free.” By 1886, he was much more frail than he had been in his heartthrob days, but you can still see the light in his eyes:

Soon after this photo was taken, Liszt would push his luck by traveling to Bayreuth to help his daughter run a music festival; the effort exhausted him, and he died there.

Nadar didn’t only photograph aging legends; he also had an eye for budding stars. He was captivated by the young actress Sarah Bernhardt, who at age 13 had been told by Alexander Dumas that she was a natural acting talent. After a brief, turbulent stint at the prestigious Comédie-Française (she left after smashing an umbrella over a doorman’s head and slapping a more experienced actress in the face), she traveled around Europe and conceived a child with Prince Henri, a Belgian nobleman, in 1864.

It was in this year that Nadar, who was doing less and less photography because of his growing obsession with hot-air ballooning, was pulled back into the studio by the 20-year-old’s inescapable charisma:

He would capture her image again and again as she rose to become one of the world’s most famous people. Here she is in 1878:

And again in 1885:

Though Bernhardt’s son Maurice, with whom she may have been pregnant in Nadar’s earliest photos of her, was the son of a Belgian aristocrat, she never acknowledged Prince Henri’s paternity, preferring to joke that the father might have been Victor Hugo.

Nadar doesn’t seem to have photographed Prince Henri, but he did capture another Belgian royal, Leopold II, who would turn out to be one of history’s greatest monsters:

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think I can see in his deadened, ambitious eyes the character that would later lead Leopold to inflict immense suffering on the people of the Congo for personal gain. The spark of humanity that you can see in the eyes of so many of Nadar’s subjects just isn’t there.

I’d imagine that Nadar’s political inclinations lay closer to those of the socialist/anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, captured here in the years before his death in 1865.

Sometimes, Nadar downplayed his art. He once said that

Photography is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds -- and one that can be practiced by any imbecile.

But he also knew that it took a special talent to find the image that would speak to people. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at these and other portraits by Nadar. So many of them bring a personality to life. Though separated by almost two centuries, I can now sort of imagine what it must have been like to be in a room with Victor Hugo or Edouard Manet. And that’s thanks to the immense, prolific talent of Nadar, who, false modesty aside, probably knew he was one of the greats.

After all, Nadar also said this: "In photography, like in all things, there are people who can see and others who cannot even look."