Napoleon sarony biography

Canadian-born Napoleon Sarony had become the most famous portrait photographer in New York.
Napoléon Sarony was an American lithographer and photographer.
Napoleon Sarony was born about 1821 in Quebec, Canada, the same year that his namesake Napoleon I died at St. Helena.

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Napoleon Sarony (1821 – 1896) was an American lithographer and photographer.

Sarony was one of the first photographers to start paying well known individuals to pose for him and then having the rights to sell their photos for profit. Sarony usually wrote personal letters to the celebrities inviting them to his studio for a photo session. In 1871, Samuel Clemens, also known as “Mark Twain” was Sarony’s perfect potential client. Sarony was the one arranging the camera, extracting the right expressions on the face and the body of his subjects, lighting, drapes and props. He had many assistants on his staff who dealt with mechanics of the camera operation and the chemical processes that had to be done. Sarony was a small man, about five feet tall with bowed legs. He had a mustache and a goatee which help showed his resemblance of Emperor Napoleon III.

He married Ellen Major in 1846 and had a son, Otto. Then, at the peak of his career, Sarony married a second time to Louise Thomas. He became a familiar figure on upper Broadway and was often seen on daily strolls with his wif

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Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures

Napoleon Sarony was once one of the most famous names in American photography. During the Gilded Age, his grand portrait studio with its one-story-high marquee reproducing the photographer’s signature in golden letters was a New York City landmark visited by celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain. Sarony’s story represents a central chapter in the history of photography. Napoleon Sarony’s Living Picturesdocuments Sarony’s career as New York City’s premier portrait photographer and details a moment when the birth of celebrity culture and growth of mass media helped promote popular acceptance of photography as fine art.

Sarony’s larger-than-life public image was crucial to demonstrating photography’s creative potential. At a time when photographers were commonly regarded as straitlaced entrepreneurs or technicians, Sarony circulated self-portraits in outlandish costumes to assert himself as a flamboyantly eccentric artist. These photographic performances forged an authorita

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Napoleon Sarony, Photographer to the Stars by Jeff Richman

Description

Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896) was one of the leading portrait photographers of the latter part of the 19th century. Working from several locations around Union Square in New York City, Sarony, over a period of decades, artfully captured images of presidents, world-famous actors, theatrical productions, the famous, and the infamous. In this talk, Jeff Richman shares the remarkable and world-class collection of Sarony photographs that he has put together for that cultural institution. Richman is historian of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y. Over three decades ago, he led his first tour at Green-Wood—a place that combines so many of his interests: 19th-century New York City and photography of it, landscape design, sculpture, rural cemeteries, contemporary photography, nature, and more. He became its part-time historian in 2001 (while practicing law, representing indigent criminal defendants for 33 years) and its full-time historian in 2007. He is the author of Brooklyn’s Green- Wood Cemetery: New York’s Burie