[5][2] Jacqueline Lamba's love for art began as a little girl growing up in Paris and frequently visiting the Louvre with her mother and sister.

"[2] After attending the Ecole de L'Union Central des Art Decoratifs from 1926 to 1929, she worked as a textile and paper designer as well as in advertising for multiple companies before becoming a painter due to her inspiration drawn from other artists, such as Maurice Denis.

Following her mother's death, Lamba moved into a "Home for Young Women," run by nuns, on the Rue de l'Abbaye.

[5] After graduating from the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs it was suggested to her, by a cousin, that she should read a book by André Breton, the leader of Surrealism.

Lamba then began to frequent the café and, on 29 May 1934, met Breton,[2][7] whom she would meet for the second time after one of her performances as a nude underwater dancer at the Coliseum on rue Rochechouart.

Breton later wrote about this encounter in his book titled, Mad Love,[8] in which he described Lamba as a "scandalously beautiful" woman.

A letter she wrote to Maar in June 1940, after she and Breton fled Vichy France during the Nazi occupation, reveals a lot about her life.

She asks about their other friends, Benjamin Péret and Remedios Varo, and says that they are living on a tiny fisherman's shack "of great impoverished beauty" on the beach of Martigues.

"As Breton's spouse," scholar Salomon Grimberg writes, "she remained nameless, and always referred to as 'her' or as 'the woman who inspired,' or as 'Breton's wife'.

[11] They collaborated on some works, such as Le Petit Mimetique (1936), a piece representing an aspect of surrealism that involves the mimicry of nature.

[13] In 1939, during one of Jaqueline Lamba's breaks from Andre Breton, she ventured to the Midi beach in Cannes with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar.

Kahlo captured her friends trepidation in the 1943 painting The Bride Frightened at the Seeing Life Opened - Lamba depicted as a tiny doll among larger, flayed-open fruit echoing the shapes of male and female genitalia.

A quote from Jacqueline lends us a small look inside the domestic life of the famed couple Breton and Lamba with daughter, Aube.

[citation needed] Unlike Andre Breton, who was considered to be tone deaf, Jacqueline Lamba was able to speak fluent English.

(Grimberg, p. 12) Living alone by choice, her paintings were complex city scapes, detailed and momentous at the same time and would take months to complete.

(Grimberg, p. 12)[2] Her continued interest in light is made evident on her gravestone, "Jacqueline Lamba 1910–1993, "the night of the sunflower" (Svododa).

It describes a night in which the poet walks through Les Halles in Paris and encounters a beautiful woman near a flower stall of sunflowers.