Jacques Lagrange was a French painter renowned for his luminous colour and sensitivity to light. The critic Waldemar George once suggested that only Henri Matisse matched him in his mastery of colour. By the 1950s, when Lagrange set up a studio near the botanical gardens in Antibes, his palette had become increasingly radiant, earning him the nickname “architect of light.” Born into a creative family – being the son of an architect and the nephew of a painter – Lagrange studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By 1937, he was collaborating with Raoul Dufy to decorate the Electricity Pavilion for the Paris International Exhibition. This experience taught him about scale and the theatre of modern decorative painting.He was conscripted during the Second World War and, after imprisonment, did not return to Paris until 1944, where he resumed his painting. He developed a personal style influenced by Léger's sense of structure, the colours of the Fauves, and the geometry of Cubism.From the late 1940s onwards, Lagrange exhibited widely across France and internationally, including at the Venice and São Paulo Biennales. Today, his work is held in major collections, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.