Nadar's hot air balloon

For the exhibition “De Louis Ghémar à James Ensor: Zwanse, fantaisie & burlesque. 1850-1914”, the atmospheric and very active Musée Félicien Rops requested one of our rarest old photographs on loan. It is a large print of a photograph taken by the famous Belgian photographer Louis Ghémar (1819-1873), one of the pioneers of this new art form.

When his French colleague Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar, took off from the Brussels Botanical Garden on 26 September 1864 in his legendary hot-air balloon Le Géant, Ghémar was quick to capture the moment on camera.

This photo clearly shows that the spectacle attracted thousands of spectators. To keep them at a safe distance, Mayor Anspach had the streets cordoned off with crowd barriers, which have since been known as “Nadar barriers” or “Nadar fences”.

However, few people know that this flight ended rather dramatically with an emergency landing in Sint-Juliaan near Ypres! All the Ypres newspapers from 1864 devoted articles to this event, but the star of the show was Engel Van Eeckhout. This Ypres printer, lithographer and publisher of the magazine De Toekomst rushed to the scene of the disaster and published a very detailed and amusing report in his newspaper on 25 September: “M. Nadar's air balloon”, accompanied by a large reproduction of a sketch made on the spot. Never shy of a joke, Van Eeckhout drew himself among the disaster tourists present.