Born in Paris on 11 November1860, Maurice Levis was an accomplished landscape and genre painter for nearly sixty years. His career spanned not only the early years of modernism, but also the twentieth century developments of cubism and surrealism. Levis' artistic education began in the late 1870s at the Académie Julian where he studied with Jules Lefebvre. He also studied with Henri Harpignies and with Pierre Billet, a painter of rural genre scenes that were often set in Normandy and Brittany.

Levis' choice of instructors reveals the multiplicity of artistic paths available to a young painter in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Jules Lefebvre was an academically trained portrait painter, who seems to have had ...