Coming of age and achieving early success at the end of the 1800s, His carried into the twentieth century the rigorous Academic standards and pre-Impressionist realism of earlier French artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme.

After the large virtuoso paintings that launched his career, he settled into a steady production of riverine landscapes of more conventional dimensions with exquisite colors and illusionistic depictions of light on still water.

The most important influence on his work was Henri Biva, whose meticulous attention to detail and feeling for nature inspired His to strive for perfection in his depictions of river and woodland scenes.

In 1898, His won the Prix Brizard of 3000 francs awarded annually by the Academie des Beaux-Arts to a landscape artist age 28 or younger (His was 21), for his painting En Aiglard, which also received an Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon of 1898.

That same year, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, his painting Ophélie (depicting Hamlet’s drowned betrothed) received an Honorable Mention, though at the Salon of 1899 some critics had preferred the landscape to the lady:

[3][4]The successful young artist’s abundant energy and ambition found expression in extravagantly large canvases, such as Les Gorges d’el Kantara près de Biskra of 1901 (238 x 335 cm.

Each strives to produce disproportionate canvases, and the youngest of them, M. His [then about 27], unwisely but with pleasure compromises his talent by painting an immensity: Solitude, a kilometer-wide landscape that covered the entire main wall of one of the galleries of the Salon.