The Nadars, a photographic legend

The Nadars

fr

Sarah Bernhardt, draped in white

Félix Nadar, around 1864

Albumen print from a collodion glass negative, 22 x 16.3 cm.
BnF, Prints and Photographs Department, EO-15 (1)-PET FOL
© Bibliothèque nationale de France
Barely 20, Sarah Bernhardt was then still a promising young actress. Félix Nadar draped her frail silhouette first in black velvet, then in a large, white-wool burnous. The truncated column, a clichéd accessory in photography studios that Nadar rarely used, stands in for a theatre set here. It seems to foreshadow the fate of the woman about whom Cocteau would coin the term "monstre sacré" (literally a "sacred monster," meaning a celebrity who is so beloved by the pople as to be above criticism).