Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, was not only one of the greatest figures in the history of the medium but one of its pioneers. Famous for his gallery of portraits of the great minds of the nineteenth century — George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gautier, Gustave Doré and many others — he invented several techniques and was the first to work from the air and underground. But his fame in that field has often overshadowed the fact that he was also a gifted caricaturist, a journalist, a man of letters and an intellectual fully immersed in his time and in the art around him: it was in his studio on the Boulevard des Capucines that in April 1874 the first group show of the Impressionists took place. He wrote a great deal about his adventures with the balloon as well as about his working life, and he was prolific in many fields — hundreds of articles as a journalist, thousands of drawings as a caricaturist, thousands of exposures, and a dozen works as a man of letters. Perhaps he did not truly excel in all of them and would be a secondary figure were it not for his work with the lens; but had he not walked the other roads too, he would not have become the brilliant maker he was.