Henri Le Sidaner was born on the island of Mauritius in 1862. At the age of ten his family moved to Dunkirk and in 1880 Le Sidaner left for Paris where he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1882. He studied under Alexandre Cabanel until 1885 during which time he discovered the work of Edouard Manet whose Bar aux Folies Bergeres was to have a profound influence on his artistic development. Cabanel was strongly opposed to the work of the Impressionists which led Le Sidaner to break away from the strict regime of his atelier and move to Etaples where he began to develop the individual technique which was to become his own personal style in the years to come.

Le Sidaner travelled extensively throughout his life, visiting Holland, Belgium, Venice, London and New York; he also moved constantly throughout France. In 1900 he visited the tiny village of Gerberoy (Seine et Oise) where Le Sidaner later bought the house which became the inspiration for many of his paintings and where he painted his beautiful still lifes. He exhibited at the Paris Salon, the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris and the Goupil Gallery in London.

Although the work of Henri Le Sidaner appears to be impervious to the artistic changes taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century he was not totally unaffected by the development of Impressionism and neo-Impressionism. His work is very much in the realist style but at the same time evocative and poetic, if combines a dreamy quality with a technical expertise and his atmospheric paintings, whether they be landscapes or still lifes, are symptomatic of his unique personal vision.