During his early years, Dehodencq studied in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts under the tutelage of French artist Leon Cogniet.

[1] Dehodencq became acquainted with the works of Spanish painters Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, which had a strong influence on his approach to painting.

In 1853 he travelled to Morocco, where for the following ten years he produced many of his most famous paintings depicting scenes of the world he encountered.

In the 1860s, Dehodencq painted multiple versions of a work depicting the public execution of a young Jewish woman in Morocco, for the crime of converting to, and then renouncing, Islam; one of these paintings was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1861 under the title Exécution d'une juive, au Maroc.

[5] Their son Edmond, born in Cádiz in 1862, was called the Mozart of painting because he debuted at the Paris Salon at age eleven.