{"id":3518,"date":"2015-10-23T09:04:54","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T13:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/preserving\/?p=3518"},"modified":"2015-10-23T09:04:54","modified_gmt":"2015-10-23T13:04:54","slug":"the-artistry-of-napoleon-sarony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/2015\/10\/23\/the-artistry-of-napoleon-sarony\/","title":{"rendered":"The artistry of Napoleon Sarony"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Napoleon Sarony (1821 – 1896) <\/sup>was a famous New York photographer and lithographer whose output\u00a0was both prodigious and imaginative. Today, he is mostly\u00a0remembered\u00a0as a portrait\u00a0photographer\u00a0and\u00a0particularly\u00a0for his original portraits of literary and cultural figures from the\u00a0late-19th-century, including such icons as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, and Sarah Bernhardt.\u00a0In addition to his artistic and technical skills, he was also a clever and prosperous\u00a0businessman,\u00a0being\u00a0one of the first photographers to start paying celebrities to pose for him and then securing\u00a0the rights to sell their photos for his own profit. In fact, he was the first to successfully defend\u00a0a photographer\u2019s right to claim copyright protection for\u00a0his own photographic work, eventually winning a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision. Sarony was also one of New York’s favorite eccentrics of the 19th century, typically seen\u00a0strutting around town in a full\u00a0hussars uniform. He was easily recognized for\u00a0his ostentatious\u00a0mustache and goatee\u00a0and uncanny\u00a0resemblance to\u00a0Emperor Napoleon III.<\/p>\n

According to Tchaikovsky:<\/p>\n

“I never came across such a droll fellow. He is a parody of Napoleon III. He turned me round and round while he looked for the best side of my face. Then he developed rather a tedious theory of the best side of the face. Finally I was photographed in every conceivable position, during which the old man entertained me with all kinds of mechanical toys.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Sarony was\u00a0appreciated for his dedication to his craft, using inventive and dynamic\u00a0backgrounds and posing his subjects with\u00a0more naturalism and spontaneity than his contemporaries. He was\u00a0quoted as saying\u00a0“a picture requires the use of all the art\u00a0the photographer commands. It must be taken at the moment the subject is unconscious, and at his best.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Sarony’s celebrated photographs overshadow his work as lithographer. However, he was equally talented with that medium as well, producing lithographs\u00a0for noted publishers such as Nathaniel Currier. He contributed his own creative lithographic work to accompany a new compilation of the Grimm brothers, entitled “The Fairy Ring”, in 1849.<\/p>\n

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A collection of Sarony’s photographic work held at Harvard can be\u00a0searched and viewed below:<\/p>\n

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Description:<\/dt>\n
The fairy ring :a new collection of popular tales for 1849. New York : E. Kearny, 1849.<\/span><\/dd>\n
Persistent Link:<\/dt>\n
http:\/\/nrs.harvard.edu\/urn-3:FHCL:1997483<\/a><\/dd>\n
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Repository:<\/dt>\n
Widener Library<\/dd>\n
Institution:<\/dt>\n
Harvard University<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Napoleon Sarony (1821 – 1896) was a famous New York photographer and lithographer whose output\u00a0was both prodigious and imaginative. Today, he is mostly\u00a0remembered\u00a0as a portrait\u00a0photographer\u00a0and\u00a0particularly\u00a0for his original portraits of literary and cultural figures from the\u00a0late-19th-century, including such icons as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, and Sarah Bernhardt.\u00a0In addition to his artistic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3653,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions\/3653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/preserving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}