William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue

What must it be like for an artist to achieve success only at the end of a long, relatively ignored career? The word ‘bittersweet’ seems particularly apt. Yet, late recognition is better, I suppose, than dying in oblivion like Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka or John Kennedy Toole.

One of my favourite photographers, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), did manage to savour the sweet smell of success in his old age. Lartigue’s late flowering was down to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and its then director of photography, John Szarkowski. There’s a very good argument to be made that during Szarkowski’s tenure at MoMA (1962–91) his shows transformed 20th-century photography. In the 1970s, by giving museum space to commercial photographers such as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Szarkowski redefined what was regarded as serious ‘art photography’. Suddenly all doors were open.

Szarkowski put on an exhibition of Lartigue’s early photographs in 1963. I have a copy of the actual MoMA catalogue, a flimsy document with somewhat sub-par reproductions. Lartigue was almost 70 in 1963 and totally unknown outside a limited circle in France. In the 1920s and 1930s he had tried and failed to achieve success as a painter and the Lartigue family fortunes had been radically diminished by the Wall Street crash and the second world war. In the 1950s Lartigue started selling his photographs to magazines as a way of making money.

The MoMA exhibition was small — only 40 photographs or so — and confined to the photographs that Lartigue had taken as a child and an adolescent in France in the first decade of the 20th century. However, the show was a massive hit and made Lartigue’s name.

Szarkowski’s curation was very specific.