Caricature of Henri Mürger 1849 - 1861

Curator: Oh, look, the image evokes a fragile melancholia—all blurry browns and pinks… Editor: Yes, indeed. What we're looking at is a caricature of Henri Mürger, created between 1849 and 1861 by Nadar. This pen, charcoal, and watercolor drawing, presently residing here at The Met, really showcases Nadar's flair for capturing a subject's essence through exaggerated features. Curator: Exaggerated is the word! Mürger’s head appears… vast. He looks like he is mid-sob and desperately holding a tissue… A route to nowhere—the ‘Route de Boheme’. Editor: Precisely. Notice how Nadar plays with scale, exaggerating Mürger’s head to almost comical proportions, while his body remains comparatively diminutive. It amplifies a sense of vulnerability, don’t you think? The eyes are so expressive. Curator: The romantic spirit captured beautifully! Bohemian isn’t an aesthetic; it’s a burden, I guess Nadar is saying, like being stuck with the head full of thoughts and little power in this world. Nadar knew the pangs of the artist’s life intimately. He and Mürger traveled in the same circles—they both understood that poignant, absurd dance of creation and survival, I think. Editor: There’s an interplay of shadow and light at play which serves to bring out not just his emotional state but a comment about how it has transformed and marked his physical being—see the face drawn and wrinkled as if in an ever present grimace of anguish. The composition itself reinforces that theme—the subject dwarfed by the sign to a Route and the sheer loneliness of it—his art! Curator: Do you think we are all romantics, secretly yearning to be understood, yearning for an audience with us in our grand melodramas of emotions, just like Henri? Editor: Perhaps. Nadar’s choice of pen and charcoal gives it an immediacy. He manages to make this intensely personal statement somehow universally relatable. It’s quite striking how efficiently the piece works; not an extraneous line. Curator: Yes—perhaps Nadar is pointing out the romantic artist can either wallow in melancholy or find power and comedy through it? Thanks, Mürger, and thanks, Nadar, for helping us see the humor and sorrow that make us human! Editor: An excellent way to sum it up. Thanks.