Étienne Cornellier, a decorator, encouraged him to register at École des beaux-arts de Marseille where he studied under the guidance of Joanny Rave.

He contributed to the decoration of Cirque d’Hiver, Basilica of the Sacré Cœur and Exposition universelle de 1889 (he was awarded a silver medal for the latter).

In addition to Étienne Cornellier, his friends were painters Gustave Marius Jullien (1825–1881), Antoine Vollon, Robert Mols, Raymond Allègre and Théophile Décanis.

Although relatively little-known outside France – unlike his Marseillais fellow citizen Adolphe Monticelli – Olive is one of Provence's most iconic painters and an emblematic figure of the French marine art movement.

His views of le Vieux-Port, in which the rendering of light compares to that of Félix Ziem's paintings, are especially well-known, together with his calanques (a local term for cliff-edged inlets along the coast between Marseille and La Ciotat).