Currently not on view
La Rifla!!,
ca.1850
Nadar, French, 1820–1910
x1948-1803
Nadar achieved his greatest fame as one of the most innovative photographers of the nineteenth century, but he began his career as a caricaturist, creating hundreds of lithographs for the illustrated newspapers Le Charivari and Journal pour rire, published by the charismatic champion of political satire Charles Philipon. The exact meaning of this caricature of two men strolling arm-in-arm down a gaslit alley is now obscure, as is the inscribed title La Rifle !!, a colloquial phrase of the period that means “a glancing shot.” Philipon (a tall and lanky man who walked with a stoop) and Nadar were intimate friends until the publisher’s death in 1861, and it is tempting to read this drawing as a humorous commentary on the nature of their friendship.
Information
Title
La Rifla!!
Dates
ca.1850
Maker
Medium
Pen and red ink over graphite
Dimensions
21.2 x 27.8 cm (8 3/8 x 10 15/16 in.)
mount: 29.8 × 38.7 cm (11 3/4 × 15 1/4 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr.
Object Number
x1948-1803
Signatures
Signed in graphite, at lower right: F. Tournachon
Inscription
in ink, bottom center: La Rifla !!
Culture
Materials
Subject
Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.;
Gifted to the Princeton University Art Museum
- 19th and 20th century French drawings from the Art Museum, Princeton University: an introduction, (Princeton, NJ: Distributed by Princeton University Press, 1972)., p. 93, cat. no. 59
- Stephan Bann, Distinguished Images: prints in the visual economy of nineteenth-century France, (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2013).
