George Sand

An early advocate of women’s rights, Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin—better known by her pen name George Sand—lived a progressive lifestyle, dressing in pants, smoking tobacco in public, and engaging in prominent love affairs, to the great shock of French society. The author of this photograph, Gaspard Félix Tournachon, who also literally made a signature name for himself—Nadar—was as renowned as his subject.

Before he began making photographs in 1854, Nadar was well known as a journalist and caricaturist, deeply entrenched in the social core of bohemian Paris, but he quickly mastered the young medium. By the mid-1860s, he had established himself as the great portraitist of the Second Empire with an incredibly successful studio on the boulevard des Capucines, where his assistants churned out thousands of portraits for the fashionable and bourgeois, with or without Nadar’s oversight.

Beyond his prowess at self-promotion, Nadar’s true brilliance lay in his ability to capture the psychological state of his subjects. Unlike many portrait photographers at the time, he eschewed studio props and instead focused solely on the person, set against a neutral background. Photographing his friends and kindred spirits—fellow artists, literary figures, left-wing politicians, and intellectuals—Nadar captured the natural qualities of his subjects, what he described as “the resemblance that is most familiar and most favorable, the intimate resemblance.” In this portrait made toward the end of Sand’s life when the two became close friends, Nadar expresses the strength and dignity of the famous author.