Camille Silvy

Camille Silvy's spectacular obscurity is hard to understand, even before you look at the photographs. In 1859 he opened a studio in Bayswater and quickly became extremely popular, even photographing members of Queen Victoria's household, although (despite decorating a room especially for Her Majesty) that ultimate accolade eluded him. Still, the visitors' book Silvy reserved for royalty is open at his portrait of Prince Albert who, like the book's other luminaries, will have had to sign beneath a blank space, with the small photograph, known as a carte-de-visite, added once ready.

Somewhere in this canny slavishness lies a clue to Silvy's vast but short-lived success. He was an artist, excited by experimentation (the still life here - 'Upside Down Rabbit with Newspaper and Salad Dressing', as I'd like to christen it - is the most wonderfully weird example of the genre I've seen) but also a businessman, capable of luring the right people before his camera and publicising the fact afterwards. Businesses require creativity too, but it can't have been easy, with Romanticism in full bloom, to be a creative genius with a pragmatic bent - not when working in a medium that itself hovered uneasily between mechanics and artistry.

One lovely photograph, 'Twilight', would, curator Mark Haworth-Booth calculates, have involved amalgamating four separate negatives: one each for softly fogged background, wall, streetlamp, and wary paperboy and customer, hands blurred mid-transaction, an incongruously clear puddle beneath them as if they'd emerged out of the blur like an allegory of the photographic process. The cartes-de-visite were more straightforward - and much more profitable. Acres of female cloth and male facial hair offer fascinating miniature encapsulations of Victorian excess, sometimes with a dollop of unintended humour: it's probably lèse-majesté to notice that Prince Albert's balding dome matches the globe beside him, but it does. He died that year, and Silvy was overwhelmed with demand for copies of this image, which can't have hurt his thriving finances. He was 27.

Silvy was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, west of Paris, and became a diplomat at 19. He travelled to Algeria to draw the new colony, but deciding he lacked sufficient talent, turned promptly to photography: a beguilingly hazy image of an Algerian hashish smoker is already astonishing in its proficiency. 'River Scene, France' was his big break, and there are two other versions here: one darkened and enriched by a gold toning bath and one annotated with poetry (by Remy Belleau, not Silvy, who was a considerably better painter than he was a poet). All spread bucolic beauty before us like a picnic blanket dotted with delicious morsels: the family on the bank, the trees reflected in still water, the professor in his boat, contemplating us right back.

There are riches here, not all of them two-dimensional: actors and soldiers, Indian beggars and French writers, Silvy's father-in-law as a postage stamp, but also Madame Silvy's dress, a sumptuous photograph album, and selections from Silvy's daybooks, which the NPG bought in 1904. Silvy was still alive then. He went home in 1867, later fighting in the Franco-Prussian war. One of the last images is a panorama of the Champs Elysées; taken using his invention for photographing battlefields, it eerily prefigures the Prussian invasion.

This, juxtaposed with the oil portrait of Silvy that opens the exhibition, cleverly evokes the long chronological journey he took in his short career. By 1874, he was in an asylum, where he died in 1910; given the balancing acts he had proved so adept at performing, it seems gruesomely appropriate that his malady was diagnosed as folie raisonnante: manic depression.