Boutet de Monvel was an academic painter, watercolorist and illustrator born in Orléans who studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel, Gustave Boulanger, Jules Joseph Lefebvre, and Carolus Duran. During the late 1870s he exhibited at the Salon de Paris and earned the medal of the third class in 1878 for a painting called The Good Samaritan.

The second child in a family of nine children, Maurice Boutet de Monvel spent the majority of his childhood in Paris, where his father taught at Charlemagne secondary school. Permitted after his A' levels to take up studies in painting, he spent a year in close proximity to Louis-Henri de Rudder (1807 - 1881), before joining the École des Beau...