All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I was flipping through a book on my desk when something stopped me. Was that...Julia Child in a tube top?!? I nearly fainted. Of happiness. In nearly all of our Getty-stock-photo records of one of the most celebrated chefs of all time, she's usually dressed for a job interview at the library: neutral blouses and shapeless skirts, perfect for TV. So to see her bare legs splayed on a rooftop, eating and laughing with friends, felt like meeting an entirely different person—a person you immediately want to get drunk and make a clafoutis with.
In France Is a Feast, a new book of Paul Child’s personal photographs from 1948-1954, Alex Prud'homme and Katie Pratt have compiled a collection of sometimes-shockingly intimate moments, a husband’s loving record of his wife and their life in Paris. I thought Julia Child in a handkerchief halter top was a national treasure, but turn a page and there she is, undressed though completely in shadow in front of a curtained window. You'll have to buy the book to see that one, weirdos.
The Childs moved to Paris after World War II because Paul was stationed as chief of the Visual Presentation Department at the U.S. Embassy. Before the war, he’d been a high school teacher with an artistic streak. Above all, he was a photo obsessive, always bringing one to three cameras wherever the couple went, which was a lot of roaming walks.
But the book is so much more than black and white slides of a family vacation. After their long boat ride to France, the first meal the Childs had was at the country’s oldest restaurant, La Couronne. It was “an epiphany. It altered her preconceptions...and ultimately set in motion her career,” writes Alex Prud'homme, the great-nephew of Paul Child and Julia's co-author of My Life in France. Soon after, Julia signed up for classes at the Cordon Bleu, where, bored in the “housewives” class, she was transferred to a class of Army men on the GI Bill. And the next thing you know, she’s teaching classes of her own, in her apartment's kitchen, to women just like her, meeting the friends she’d write Mastering the Art of French Cooking with a decade later. Through Paul’s photographs you see Julia “before she was Julia,” and it's tons of fun. See ten photos from the book below:
Julia "softened Paul's edges and encouraged his humor," writes Prud'homme. Here she is hanging out with the couples' cat, Minette, in the apartment they nicknamed "Roo de Loo." In their years in France she eventually learned to speak French fluently, in case you were wondering...
Paul is blurry here because he was running back from setting the camera timer to take this epic balcony lunch selfie. The frosty glasses of wine, her tube top, the view—all of the signs that the Childs had this whole life thing all figured out.
Per the book, Paul loved Julia's "long gams," featured here in a particularly Hitchcock-ian scene. Well, Hitchcock-ian until you can hear Julia's voice on the phone, warbling "It was a simply marvelous GUINEA HEN!!!"
Julia Child in a halter crop top, people.
The Childs kept busy in Paris. In a typical week in 1950, writes Prud'homme, they went to the movies, hosted an embassy party, hung out with an art historian, and "dined at a little restaurant near their apartment and discussed painting, engraving, and typography over bottles of wine with a group of French friends." Ah yes, the exhilarating topic of typography.
"Without her, I'd probably be a miserable misanthrope," wrote Paul. Same.
There are only a handful of shots in the book of Julia actually cooking, and they're often her standing tall over a tiny French stove. Seriously, she had to hunch over to stir things. It looks like she's in a tiny prop house for an Instagram promo. And yet! She learned how to cook there, so you can't complain about your tiny rental kitchen.
This was AFTER she dropped a freshly plucked chicken down the stairwell, FYI.
Julia, along with friends Simone (Simca) Beck Fischbacher and Louisette Bertholle, taught cooking classes to American wives stationed in Paris in the Childs' kitchen, calling themselves "L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes" ("school of the three hearty eaters"). PLEASE NOTE: the matching embroidered uniforms. The three later wrote a little cookbook together that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
"[Paul] adored her and photographed her constantly," writes Prud'homme, "without realizing it at the time, he was chronicling her rise from a fumbling know-nothing in the kitchen to an accomplished cook and author, and America's first celebrity TV chef." This might be our favorite Julia yet.
