[MALLARMÉ] DORNAC, Paul Cardon, dit (1858-1941)

[MALLARMÉ] DORNAC, Paul Cardon, dit (1858-1941)

Original photograph on albumen paper on thick cardboard
[Paris, 22 Apr. 1893], 122 x 177 mm
Framed in walnut (268 × 323 mm), with beige mount and 92% museum glass.
Fine contrasts

Fine print of the Symbolist poet at home, rue de Rome

Mallarmé is shown here seated, a note in hand, legs crossed, his gaze slightly vacant. His carefully studied pose suggests a staging meticulously calculated by Dornac. In the background, one can make out the poet’s cabinet with its Japonisme motifs (now preserved at the Musée départemental Stéphane Mallarmé in Valvin), on which are arranged the last photographic portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Carjat and an engraving of Mallarmé’s friend Théodore de Banville.
It was at this address, 87 rue de Rome, that the celebrated Mardis were held, bringing together the intellectual and artistic elite of the period. Among those who mingled there were Paul Claudel, Claude Debussy, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Jarry, Paul Valéry and James Whistler, among others.

Active from the late 1880s until the First World War, the brilliant Dornac specialised in portraits of notable figures photographed not in the studio but in their private spaces, at home or in their places of work, following a principle of contextualisation that admitted only rare exceptions. He is the author of the series Nos contemporains chez eux (1887-1917), which comprises more than four hundred photographs of major figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries drawn from the literary, artistic, musical, scientific and political spheres.