Renée Perle

Renée Perle (...-1977) Artist Born in Romania, date and place unknown; died in the South of France in 1977. Renée Perle, a Romanian Jewish girl who moved to Paris, is famous as the first muse of the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), who is considered one of the leading photographers of the 20th century.

Renée lived with Lartigue as his girlfriend, having met him in 1929 or 1930 on the Rue de la Pompe. He thought she was Mexican, but he guessed wrong; Perle was Romanian, and a model once employed by the French dressmaker Doeuillet. "She is beautiful," Lartigue told his diary. "The small mouth with the full painted lips! The ebony black eyes. From under her fur coat comes a warmth of perfume. The head looks petite on her long neck."

The pair spent two years together, cavorting as if on eternal vacation in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Biarritz, with Lartigue's camera always at the ready. In the "shadowless heaven" of his photographs, glamorous women, including his first and second wives, Bibi and Florette, abound, but Perle's lacquered hair, slender silhouette, modern T-shirts, armfuls of bangles, and talonlike nails shone the brightest. "Around her," Lartigue wrote, "I see a halo of magic." Her spectacular beauty inspired some of his best photographs.

Renée also painted, and a large number of her quaint and naive self-portraits are seen in some Lartigue photos. They do not show much mastery of artistic technique, but they have a strange fascination, perhaps because they show something approaching a manic-compulsion by Renée to paint her own face on canvas over and over, almost without end. There have been many efforts to find one of these portraits, as a specimen, but so far with no success. Renée's step-daughter has an oil portrait of her step-mother, but everything else which had been carefully preserved by Renée was dispersed in 2000 and 2001 in two famous Paris sales by Tajan.