Lartigue’s Colour

In our In the Spotlight series, we invite you to take a closer look at selected works by the artists and archives we represent, exploring their stories, context and significance. The works featured are available to acquire through our Gallery.

Available to Collect

Lartigue's colour photographs are available as archival pigment prints in various paper sizes. The prints are embossed with the Archive blind stamp recto and annotated in pencil verso.

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986) is perhaps best known for his black-and-white photographs of early 20th-century French high society, capturing the elegance, spontaneity and charm of the Belle Époque.

Yet colour was a significant part of his practice: nearly forty percent of Lartigue’s work is in colour.

Lartigue’s fascination with colour began in his youth, when he made his first Autochrome photographs as early as 1912, producing dreamlike images reminiscent of Impressionist paintings with delicate glass colour plates. 

From the late 1940s onward, he also experimented with Ektachrome film, photographing the French Riviera, his wife Florette or his famous friends such as Pablo Picasso, producing photographs filled a distinctive sense of vibrancy.

Lartigue’s use of colour was remarkably ahead of its time as colour photography would only begin to gain wide recognition in the fine art world from the mid-1970s onwards.

Before its first major archival release in 2015, Lartigue’s colour photography had remained almost completely unseen. The Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue digitally restored and scanned his fragile original colour positives, transforming them into modern archival pigment prints, making this special body of work accessible to a wider audience.