About This Image

One of Lartigue's earliest and most iconic images, probably the only such vintage print still in private hands. On the back: Handwritten indications: "1910" - "9" - "1912" (crossed out).

See: Kevin Moore, Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (Princeton University Press, 2004), pl. 26.

Movement was a constant source of inspiration for the young Jacques-Henri Lartigue: his most memorable photographs capture perfect moments of action and excitement. In the present image, the photographically-precocious sixteen-year-old Lartigue tilts the frame to accentuate the velocity of ‘le bob’ as it takes a turn and kicks up a dramatic spray of gravel.

Lartigue and his close family built and raced various machines. Many of them are visible in his image of them laid up for winter (D'Astier, M., et al, London, 2004, fig. 7 on p. 38). By the configuration of the steering gear, this would appear to be the machine nearest the viewer in that image, a different machine to the one illustrated on p. 94 of the same volume. cf. Lartigue, J.-H., 1970 (Diary of a Century), where the final endpapers reproduce Lartigue's drawing of the arrangements he made to photograph this scene, and description in the text reveals that the hill upon which these races was conducted, at Lartigue's parents' chateau at Rouzat, was five kilometres long.

Provenance: This print was at one time in the collection of Florette Lartigue.

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