[1][2] He was born in Paris on March 18, 1851 to Jean Dupré (a jeweler) and Pauline Bouillié.

[1] It was expected that he enter the family business, and to that end Dupré began working in a shop that sold lace.

However, his parents were forced to close their shop due to the war of 1870 and the siege of Paris.

In the mid-1870s he traveled to Picardy and became a student of the rural genre painter Désiré François Laugée, whose daughter Marie Eléonore Françoise he married in 1876; the year he exhibited his first painting at the Paris Salon.

[4] Throughout his career Dupré championed the life of the peasant and continued painting scenes in the areas of Normandy and Brittany.