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Born into one of the wealthiest families of France, Jacques Henri Lartigue was given a camera by his father when he was 8 years old. Feverishly, he recorded the happy days of his childhood, capturing on film transient moments he feared to lose. Elegant ladies leap from walls and staircases, the skirts of their corseted dresses caught mid-air. Pets run, fall, leap and bounce and couples promenade along sweeping Parisian boulevards and windswept beaches. These treasured memories were also described enthusiastically in written journals where he records and illustrates in detail the events of the day; a ritual he practised to the end of his life. Lartigue wrote, photographed or painted nearly every day of his adult life and themes and compositions that impressed him in adolescence quietly resurface in his later work.
First and foremost, Lartigue considered himself a painter. He enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1915, exhibited his paintings at both the Galerie Georges Petit and the Salon d’Automne in 1922, and continued to exhibit in Paris until 1939. At the end of the Second World War, commercial pressures resulted in Lartigue favoring photography over painting. The Museum of Modern Art in New York honored him with a retrospective exhibition in 1963.
...In his photography, Lartigue played the game piege d’oeil, where he would spin around like a top and all of sudden halt and snap a photograph.
....Lartigue continued painting portraits to make a living from 1920 until 1943." http://www.leicestergalleries.com/19th-20th-century-paintings/d/aquarium/15337 undefined