A celebration of the genius of the early photographer Nadar, 1976

On the cover, a rumpled Rossini looks vulnerable, wig slightly askew, weary but warmly benign. Inside, Baudelaire stares down the viewer with frank appraisal, hands in pockets and Victor Hugo lies on his deathbed, white beard haloed with light. These photographs – legends made intimately human – are the work of the photographer Nadar, celebrated by the Observer Magazine in 1976.

Nadar (real name Félix Tournachon) worked as a cartoonist and illustrator before finding his calling as the portraitist of an illustrious slice of 19th-century Parisian life. The clientele of his studio (his son Paul continued his work, taking some of the portraits in the article) reads like a who’s who: of Parisian culture Berlioz and Offenbach ; Manet and Delacroix ; Zola and Hugo. But

Nadar worked simply and without props, but with real sympathy

Nadar was not a fashionable photographer; a leftwinger, he was a chronicler of friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends. It just so happened that the ‘impoverished artists, writers, musicians and aspiring thinkers’ he frequented Left Bank cafés and garrets with were spectacularly good at what they did. Baudelaire in particular was a lifelong intimate. Nadar described their first meeting: he was a ‘strange ghostly figure’ in pink gloves, with a ‘superabundance of curling, very black hair that fell to his shoulders – a mane like a waterfall’.

‘Warm and outgoing’ Nadar worked simply and without props, but with real sympathy. There’s a palpable human frailty to the images that early photography rarely managed to capture. The Rossini portrait was taken around 1856 when the composer was in his 60s and in poor physical and mental health (he referred to himself as ‘an old piece of rococo’ and wore wigs not for vanity but for warmth). But he feels intensely present: ‘Genial warmth and human sympathy glow out of the photograph.’

It makes you wonder what Nadar himself looked like. A self-portrait reveals a jolly, moustachioed chap with a look of the laughing cavalier. You can’t tell, but apparently his hair was fiery red, the same colour he painted his studio, inside and out.