The son of a sculptor, Henry d’Estienne studied in Carcassonne and Montpellier before arriving in Paris, where he took lessons at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs* He was soon admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts* as a student of the leading Orientalist* painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. D’Estienne made his public debut at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français* in 1896, where three years later he exhibited a portrait of his grandmother, which was acquired by the State for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Carcassonne.

The painting, today in the Musée d’Orsay, also won the artist a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle* of 1900, for which he also painted a landscape diorama* of the coast of Somalia that earned him an appoint...