Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter noted for the spontaneous, joyful photographs he took beginning in his childhood and continuing throughout his life. Lartigue’s boyhood photographs were almost always candid images taken of his family and friends. Lartigue studied painting at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1915 to 1916 and would always consider himself a painter first and foremost. In the 1910s and 1920s Lartigue enthusiastically photographed such subjects as automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying. He generally worked in black and white, but during this period he also experimented with the recently developed Autochrome color process, which satisfied his painterly interests.