Portrait of Renée Perle

Jacques Henri Lartigue was a French photographer and painter, known for his photographs of automobile races, planes and Parisian fashion female models. Born in Courbevoie, France to a wealthy family, Jacques Henri Lartigue started taking photographs when he was seven. He photographed his friends and family at play – running and jumping; racing home-built race cars; making kites, gliders as well as aeroplanes; and climbing the Eiffel Tower. He also photographed sport events, and captured in his camera, tennis players such as Suzanne Lenglen at the French Open tennis championships. Many of his initial, famous photographs were originally captured through stereo, but he also produced a vast number of images in all formats and media including glass plates in various sizes, autochromes, and film. While he sold a few photographs to sporting magazines, he concentrated on painting which also was his source of income and living. However, he continued taking photographs and maintained written journals about them throughout his life. At age of 69 his boyhood photographs were 'discovered' by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency who introduced Lartigue to John Szarkowski who arranged an exhibition of his work at Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition gained him fame and exposure to the industry. He then got opportunities to work with several fashion magazines and became famous in other countries as well. He was rewarded with his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1975, which paved way for more commissions from fashion and decoration magazines. His most frequent muses were his three wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle