Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870) (1855): Art, History and Details

Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870) (1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Nadar (French, 1820–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Celebrities he photographed included his friend, the wildly successful French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. In 1874, Nadar loaned his studio to a group of artists so they could mount the first exhibition of Impressionist painting, which included works by Berthe Morisot.

Object facts

• Title: Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870)
• Date: 1855
• Creator attribution: Nadar (French, 1820–1910)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 23.8 x 17.8 cm (9 3/8 x 7 in.); Matted: 45.7 x 35.6 cm (18 x 14 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1983.198

A detail from the museum

Nadar was an alias for Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a prominent and well-connected photographer, caricaturist, and writer who photographed many of the cultural and political celebrities of the age.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Tom E. Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. [Cleveland, OH]: The Museum, 1996.
• Turner, Evan H. "Year in Review for 1983." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71, no. 2 (1984): 38-79.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.