Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner (7 August 1862 – 14 July 1939) was an intimist painter known for his paintings of domestic interiors and quiet street scenes.

Le Sidaner favoured a subdued use of colour, preferring nuanced greys and opals applied with uneven, dappled brushstrokes to create atmosphere and mysticism.

A skilled nocturne painter, he travelled widely throughout France and Europe before settling at Gerberoy in the Picardy countryside from where he painted for over thirty years.

His seductive views of the gardens he created in the ruins of the medieval fortress at Gerberoy, with their recently vacated tables dappled in sunlight and overhung by roses, have cemented his reputation as a unique artist who does not fit easily into an art movement .

[3] Henri Le Sidaner was born August 7, 1862, at Port Louis in Mauritius, where his Breton parents Jean Marie (1828–1880) and Amélie Henrietta (née Robberechts) were living.

His father Jean Marie was a ship inspector for Lloyd's whose business took the family back to France in 1872[note 1] The remainder of his childhood was spent in Dunkerque where he attended the Collège et Lycée Notre Dame des Dunes and where he met and befriended Eugène Chigot who was to become a lifelong friend and supporter.

[4] He showed aptitude for painting, in which he was supported by his parents, and attended art classes at the atelier of Alphonse Chigot and with a teacher who had been a pupil of Philippe-Jacques van Bree.

[2] Le Sidaner's portfolio was adjudged good enough for the city of Dunkerque to award him a scholarship and in 1880, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Paris and the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

[8] Étaples had a tradition of en plain air painting established by Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878), who retreated there from the outbreak of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the local Deauville painter Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), a leading post impressionist.

[11] Le Sidaner became close friends with the Norwegian landscape artist Frits Thaulow and they travelled to The Netherlands in 1891, a visit that produced a number of paintings including Jong meisje in de duinen (Young Woman in the Dunes)(1891)[12] and Fillette au jardin (1894), an intimist painting of Thaulow's daughter unusual for the brightness of the colours that Le Sidaner choose for the little girl.

The theme had been explored by Jean-Charles Cazin (1840 - 1901), an older artist also from the Pas-de-calais, who became known for his views of uninhabited streets, often illuminated by a single light coming from a window.

In another twilight painting Crépuscule, Maisons Quai De Rosaire (1900)[18] the sombre palette is again off-set by the familiar motif of a lighted window casting its penumbra across the silent waters of the canal.

[21] In 1902 Le Sidaner joined his old friend Eugène Chigot for an extended visit to Gravelines and Gisors[22] The preference for a few years was to avoid the harsh Oise winters and encamp to milder climes.

This series of paintings were highly acclaimed as examples of Le Sidaner's ability to capture atmospheric lighting effects, using dappled brushwork to create a sense of the luminosity of twilight.

It is vibrant with reds, oranges and green, and depicts a seemingly ordinary street in Villefranche overlooking a narrow steep passageway leading to a church.