Cartier-Bresson was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy , where Henri spent part of his childhood. His mother was descended from Charlotte Corday. Since his parents were providing financial support, Henri pursued photography more freely than his contemporaries.
Henri also sketched. He was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion, and was required to address his parents with formal vous rather than tu. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was strong-willed and also feared this prospect. A governess called "Miss Kitty" who came from across the Channel, instilled in him the love of - and competence in - the English language. Cartier-Bresson said, "He used the informal 'tu', which usually meant you were about to get a good thrashing.
But he went on, 'You're going to read in my office. He studied painting when he was just 5 years old, taking an apprenticeship in his uncle Louis' studio. After trying to learn music , Cartier-Bresson was introduced to oil painting by his uncle Louis, a gifted painter and winner of the Prix de Rome in But his painting lessons were cut short when uncle Louis was killed in World War I. Lhote's ambition was to integrate the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms; he wanted to link the French classical tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David to Modernism.
Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Paris galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance masters: Jan van Eyck , Paolo Uccello , Masaccio , Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as his teacher of "photography without a camera.
Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, the rigorous theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. In the s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe but each had a different view on the direction photography should take.
