Napoleon Sarony
Napoleon Sarony (* around 1821 in Québec ; † November 9, 1896 in New York City ) was an American photographer, draftsman and lithographer .
Life
Napoleon Sarony was the son of a lithographer who had emigrated to Canada from Birmingham . He had seven siblings and lost his mother when he was about ten years old. In the 1830s he came to New York, where he worked as a lithographer for Henry R. Robinson and Nathaniel Currier. He later founded his own company with Henry B. Major. In 1846 he married Ellen Major, presumably a sister of his business partner. In 1850 he lived with his family, which at that time also included the two toddlers Ida († 1878) and Otto Sarony, with Henry B. Major.
In 1857 Joseph F. Knapp joined Sarony and Major; the company was now called Sarony, Major & Knapp Lithography Company. The American Lithographic Company later developed from this.
Ellen Sarony died in January 1858. Napoleon Sarony then moved to Europe with his children. He studied art in Berlin , Paris and London . In Scarborough he visited his brother Olivier , who was very successful as a portrait photographer, and decided to pursue this career as well. After the end of the Civil War he returned to the USA. In 1865 he opened his first photo studio on Broadway at number 630. The studio later moved to number 680.
Napoleon Sarony recognized the opportunities that the market for pictures of famous and well-known people offered him early on and focused on them. He paid stars and famous people to photograph them and then sell the pictures. Usually he wrote to these people directly and invited them to photo sessions, for example in 1871 Mark Twain . In the same year he moved his photo studio to Union Square. In house number 37 it took up several floors; Visitors took an elevator to his reception room on the fifth floor. His pictures, in which he arranged a very personal environment for each of his objects and photographed them with the most typical facial expressions and gestures possible, made him famous. It went down in copyright history in 1883/84 when it emerged victorious from the lawsuit with the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company for the rights to a photographic portrait of Oscar Wilde .
Sarony was a member of various clubs in which artists and writers moved. Francis Hopkinson Smith designed the character Julius Bianchi in The Fortunes of Oliver Horn after Sarony, Wilkie Collins dedicated his book Heart and Science to him . Mark Twain had the sculptor Karl Gerhardt create a work of art that showed himself and George Washington Cable . Gerhardt may have used a Sarony photograph for this. Twain himself was rather unhappy about a popular portrait that Sarony had taken and compared it to a photograph of a clothed gorilla. He did not succeed in suppressing this image. In 1913 it was used as the basis for an advertising image for a cigarette brand and given the slogan "Known to Everyone - Liked by All".
In April 1896, Sarony relocated his photo studio one last time and on the occasion of this move sold a large part of the equipment, including an Egyptian mummy. Maybe he was in financial trouble at the time. He received around $ 5,000 for the 1,000 or so pieces of equipment. He moved the studio to 256 Fifth Avenue and resided at 126 West Forty-seventh street. He died there a few months after moving his studio. He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn .
He left behind his son Otto and two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Fry in London and Jennie Fisher. A daughter Isabelle, who married Joseph Bonanno in 1885, was believed to have come from Sarony's second wife, Louise, but was likely born premaritally and may have died before Sarony's death.
Napoleon Sarony is said to have photographed around 30,000 celebrities and around 200,000 well-known personalities. It is believed that he made up to 500,000 pictures in his life.
Otto Sarony, who had become known as his father's companion and as a sailor, sold the photo studio and its name on October 7, 1898 to John F. Burrow - possibly the same Burrow who had once been involved in the copyright lawsuit. After Otto Sarony had sold the right to use the name Sarony to Theodore Marceau, he got into trouble himself. Otto Sarony died in 1903, leaving behind a son named Arthur Yale Sarony. The legal dispute over the name Sarony was not settled in Burrow's favor until 1908.
Napoleon Sarony's widow Louise married Domenico Bonanno in 1897. She died a few months before Otto Sarony. The whereabouts of the approximately 500,000 glass negatives from Napoleon Sarony's estate after the death of Louise Bonanno is unclear. Sarony's works can be found in numerous museums in the USA as well as in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sarony, Napoleon |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American photographer, draftsman, and lithographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1821 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Quebec |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 9, 1896 |
| Place of death | New York City |