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Description: Lartigue, Jacques-Henri Zissou and our Tire-boat Gelatin silver print. 1911. Cropping lines in blue ink on the recto; date in blue pencil and printer's notations in ink on the verso. 3 x 4in. (8.3 x 11.4cm.) LITERATURE See: Guichard, Boyhood Photos of J. H. Lartigue: The Family Album of a Gilded Age, p. 65; Poirot-Delpech et al., Jacques-Henri Lartigue le Choix de Bonheur, p. 37; Avedon, Diary of a Century, p. 29; Favrod, Jacques-Henri Lartigue Souvenirs de mon Bonheur, p. 95; L'Association des Amis de Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Bonjour Monseuir Lartigue, p. 38; Szarkowski, The Photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, p. 20; Favord, Jacques-Henri Lartigue Album, p. 32; Cech, Jacques-Henri Lartigue Boy with a Camera, p. 24. NOTES Lartigue recollects: Here is a closer view of Zissou and our tire-boat. To operate simply slide your legs into a pair of waders sealed to the bottom of the hull, and then "walk" through the water. For us it was at last an answer to the old question in the famous nursery song: "Maman, do the little boats have legs?" ( Boyhood Photos of J. H. Lartigue: The Family Album of a Gilded Age, p. 65) Lartigue was fascinated with beauty, elegance, excitement and fun. He was especially interested in recording his family's exploits as exemplified in this photograph of his brother. "My brother Zissou," Lartigue recalls, "had a vivid intelligence and he invented so many things--wooden horses, crates on wheels, even a velodrome--but I was always the little boy, in a way, kept in the corner, dying to take part. This really grieved me, until one day I said to myself, 'Now I am going to catch all these beautiful things which they do.'...In a daily journal that little Jacques-Henri kept at the time, and has kept ever since, there is this joyful annotation for a day in 1901: "Papa is like God (as a matter of fact, he might even be God in disguise). He's just told me, 'I'm going to give you your own camera.' Now I can take pictures of everything... everything. I know very well that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken, and I will take them all!" (Aperture, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, p. 7.) This is the only known vintage print of this image in private hands. There may be another extant vintage print in the collection of l'Association des Amis de Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Paris.