[1] A pupil of Cabanel, he was famous for his portraits of wealthy citizens and politicians in Paris, paintings of ancient history and scenes of peasant life.

As a Republican and veteran of the War of 1870, Debat-Ponsan engaged in the struggle for rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, he exhibited his allegorical painting Vérité sortant du puits (Truth coming out of the well) at the 1898 Salon,[2] later offered to Émile Zola.

His scenes of rural life, a very fashionable genre around 1830–1840, hesitate between the idealism of the peasant world and the militant realism of a Gustave Courbet.

It depicts Catherine de' Medici (in black) calmly viewing the bodies of victims of the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

Debat-Ponsan may have actually intended to refer to more recent events in French history, such as the bloody suppression of the Commune of Paris, nine years before this painting was made.