French post-impressionist painter born in Amiens into a bourgeois family. His first visits to the South of France date back to his childhood, when his parents owned a villa in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, where the family regularly vacationed. From 1896 to 1900, the young man attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied with Fernand Cormon, Albert-Charles Wallet, Ferdinand Humbert and Eugène Thirion. His presence at the Paris Salons is attested from 1903, when he took part in his first Salon des artistes français.

In the early 1900s, he began to frequent Saint-Tropez, the small fishing port that Paul Signac had discovered in 1892 aboard his boat L'Olympia, and which since then has divided its time between the South of Fran...