Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter noted for his spontaneous photographs that chronicled the rapid modernization in Belle Époque Paris. His informal, lighthearted images reveal his love of life and a keen eye for capturing fleeting moments in a world that was quickly speeding up.

Lartigue was born into an affluent family and received his first camera as a gift from his father, also an amateur photographer, when he was eight years old. Drawn to movement, he quickly began to photograph his family and household staff in action around their home near Paris and kept a diary to document these exploits. After spending much of his childhood honing his photographic skills, Lartigue instead decided to briefly study painting at the Académie Julian in Paris (1915-16). While he regularly exhibited and sold his decorative paintings in Paris' official salons during his lifetime, today Lartigue is best known for his playful photographs that capture the enduring allure and excitement of the Belle Époque.

Lartigue remained relatively unknown as a photographer until a series of supposedly chance encounters while visiting New York led to his photographs' publication in Life magazine (1963) and his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art later that year. At the time of his "discovery," Lartigue's images elicited a deep sense of nostalgia for a more blissful time before the devastation of two world wars. Many influential American critics and enthusiasts quickly embraced his early work as a precursor to street photography and the "snapshot aesthetic" of the following generation. He exhibited his photographic work regularly throughout the rest of his life. He published several monographs to great acclaim, most notably The Family Album (1966) and Diary of a Century (1970), which paired his photographs with corresponding diary entries.

Lartigue was honored with his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1975 and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor that same year. Subsequently, Lartigue donated his entire photographic archive to the French government in 1979, which has provided the source material for many traveling exhibitions and encouraged continuing scholarship on his life and work. Today, museums in the United States and Europe regularly exhibit his photographs, and the Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris, organized the most recent major retrospective of his work in 2003 on the 40th anniversary of his major MoMA exhibition. His work is in many public collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among many others.