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Mastering the art of French photography: meet Julia Child's multi-talented husband Paul
In the 2009 film Julie & Julia, the life story of the American food writer Julia Child – author of the 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking – is intertwined with the efforts of a latter-day fan to cook her way through all 734 pages of it.
Julia’s husband Paul makes a few appearances in the movie, chiefly to eat, enthuse and encourage; he’s a soothing counterweight to Julia’s warbles and eccentricities. We might consider him the bacon to her beef, in her celebrated recipe for bourguignon; or the butter to the sole in her meunière, her first taste of which, at a Rouen restaurant in 1948, set Julia – a self-described “6ft 2in, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian” – on a journey that would take her from bridge-playing wife to gourmet television chef, heart set on educating palates from sea to shining sea.
In reality, though, Paul Child was every bit as exceptional as his wife. A diplomat by profession, he was also an accomplished, formally trained artist. He had a black belt in judo. He wrote good poetry. And – as a new book, France Is a Feast, reveals – he took marvellous photographs.
Some are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acquired by the curator Edward Steichen, who visited the Childs when they were living in Paris in 1952 on the Rue de l’Université (or the “Roo de Loo”, as Julia had it). A handful of Paul’s pictures were used in Julia’s 2006 memoir, My Life in France, published posthumously with the help of Alex Prud’homme, Paul’s great-nephew. Prud’homme is also the co-author of France Is a Feast, which he describes as “a visual extension of Julia’s memoir… that lets Paul take the lead”.
The book covers the period from 1948 to 1954, when the couple were posted first to Paris, then on to Marseille, and travelled widely in France, too. Paul photographed almost daily. And if he wasn’t photographing, Julia said, he was writing about photographing.
Paris, above all, was “a natural subject for Paul,” wrote Julia. “He had lived there as a young man, and it was part of his life… He taught me to appreciate things that I would have otherwise just skimmed over or missed… He caught the spirit of the city, and you could feel his love for the subjects.” Each Sunday, Julia and Paul would set out to explore a quarter of Paris they hadn’t visited before, and he would take dozens of pictures.
The timing of their stay was fortuitous. Paris in the Fifties was brimming with photographers – it seems you could hardly have set up your tripod without bumping into Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans, André Kertész or Robert Doisneau. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the style of Paul’s work often dovetails with theirs.
He sought out the city’s quieter corners – churches with courtyards full of old trees, laundry hanging from balconies, fishermen on the Seine – but captured them from unusual angles, in shadow, and via reflections. In a letter to his twin brother, Charles, Paul noted his new “predilection for… strong contrasts, semi-abstraction, surface-textures, rhythmic repeats”.
Chief among his subjects, though, was Julia, whom he adored. The pair met during the Second World War, in Kandy, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where both were working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime intelligence agency.
Paul worked in Presentation, illustrating troop movements or making charts of Japanese camouflage patterns, for instance, and building secret war rooms for various admirals and generals. He was still getting over a previous love affair when he met, in the adjacent office, one Julia McWilliams, a clerk typist 10 years his junior, with whom he struck up a friendship. He wrote to his brother describing Julia’s “somewhat ragged, but pleasantly crazy sense of humour”. In 1946, they married.
It was partly to please Paul that Julia learned to cook. She was something of an ingénue, and he took delight in educating her in his passions. Their curriculum consisted of art, literature, politics, and a great deal of wine and food. Julia was an eager pupil.
In between French classes she began wandering Paris alone, discovering snug little restaurants in hidden courtyards and local markets. Once, after they had been to a nightclub, she persuaded Paul to join the barrow men at the flower and vegetable market of Les Halles for onion soup and red wine, at 5am. “I loved France so much,” she later recalled. “that I secretly thought I was French, only no one had told me. I was so excited that I sometimes forgot to breathe.”
Julia’s early forays into haute cuisine, though, were disastrous: calves’ liver simmered in red wine turned vile, and she managed to make a duck explode – stories on which she would later dine out. So she enrolled at the Cordon Bleu, where she was taught to cook la cuisine bourgeoise: carefully prepared, middle-class food. There she experienced, as she put it, “a flowering of the soul”.
When the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking made Julia famous, Paul became her manager, her recipe tester, her proofreader – and also her illustrator. At the time, recipe book photographs showed the food being prepared from a spectator’s perspective, as if you were attending a lesson.
But both Paul and Julia thought it better to show the process from the cook’s point of view. (The innovation is given a brief cameo in Julie & Julia, with Paul, camera in hand, perched on a chair above his wife, as she bones, stuffs and parcels up a “duckie”.) The shift in perspective was so self-evidently practical that most modern cookbooks still use it.
There are nearly 200 images in France Is a Feast – a tiny sample of Paul’s eventual archive. It is in part, of course, Julia’s journey that we are observing, but it is Paul’s, too – one on which he embraces his talent, gives it flesh, tests it, and ultimately perfects it. All the while, falling deeper in love with his wife. And her cooking.
France is a Feast: The Photographic Journey of Paul and Julia Child by Alex Prud’homme and Katherine Pratt is published by Thames & Hudson at £24.95