Louis Valtat

He was accepted, and in 1887 Valtat moved to Paris to enroll at the Ecole, where he studied with the well-known academic artists Gustave Boulanger (1824–1888), Jules Lefebvre (1836–1911), and later with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845–1902).

These last three, calling themselves "Nabis" (after the Hebrew word meaning prophets), were influenced by Paul Gauguin's (1848–1903) Synthetist method of painting based on the use of simple forms, pure colors, and large patterns.

He made his debut in 1893 at the Salon of Independent Artists, displaying several paintings depicting street scenes of the neighborhood surrounding his art studio.

During this early period in his career, Valtat used the spontaneous light touches of Impressionism (although with bordered objects)[2] and the colorful dots found in Pointillism.

As noted by Cogniat, Péniches has the impressionistic rendering of the mobile reflections of rippling water while Pommiers is "alive with the dazzling brilliance of sunlit reds and yellows intensified by the stippled strokes of green".

Art historian Natalie Henderson Lee identifies Valtat as a "proto-Fauve",[9] although he remained somewhat apart from the Fauve group, and never adopted their extreme boldness in the treatment of form and color.