Born at Dieppe on 8 August 1869 Louis Valtat studied at the Hoche secondary school in Versailles, where his parents were living. In 1886, the year when Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Paris for the first time, Louis, aged 17, applied for admission to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where his teachers were to be Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, and later Benjamin Constant.

Winner of the Jauvin d'Attainville prize in 1890, he went on to install his studio in the rue de La Glacie' in Paris, and the first paintings he entered for the Salon des Artistes Indendants in 1893 were scenes of the daily life in the surrounding streets, like Sur le Boulevard, a canvas that was favourably commented by art critic and writer Felix Feneon.

At the end of 1894, in collaboration with Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and aided by Albert Andre he created the d'or for the theatre "L'Oeuvre" at the request of Lugne Poe' His engravings and paintings were hung at the exhibition of the Salon des Cent. He was suffering from tuberculosis and went down to Banyuls on the Mediterranean coast, where George-Daniel de Monfreid introduced him to Aristide Maillol ; together they made a number of trips to Figueras in Spain.

In 1895, continuing his convalescence in Arcachon, Louis Valtat painted numerous canvases in very violent tones which were remarked by Felix Feneon; these paintings were the forerunners of Fauvisme, a movement that created a scandal 10 years later at the Salon d' Automne of 1905.

A group exhibition was organised by Paul Signac at the Durand Ruel gallery in March 1899, where Valtat exhibited twenty canvases, fifteen of which were shown under the heading "Notations d'Agay, 1899".He had in fact been spending autumn and winter in the south since 1898, first at Agay, a small fishing village close to Saint Raphael, with his future wife Suzanne, whom he married in 1900.

And it was also in 1900 that, on the advice of Renoir, Ambroise Vollard made an agreement with Valtat, buying practically all his work for the next ten years.

His absence from Paris did not prevent him from attending the Libre Esthque exhibition in Bruxelles the same year, where he showed Le Jardin du Luxembourg and Le Boulevard Saint Michel ; in 1903 he exhibited in Vienna at the "Gebael der Secession", and in 1906 in Dresden at the Kunst Salon Ersnt Arnold. Farther afield, he also exhibited in Berlin at the Berliner Secession, in Budapest, in Prague, and in Moscow in 1908 at the Moskva Tretyakov gallery.

During their stays at Antheor, the Valtats often crossed the Esterel hills, sometimes on bicycles, to visit Auguste Renoir, who had rented the Maison de la Poste in Cagnes. On one such visit in 1903, Renoir painted the Portrait de Suzanne Valtat, while Valtat made a number of pen and ink studes for a Portrait de Renoir. The drawings were used as the basis for a woodcut. The distance from Esterel to Saint Tropez was about 40 kilometres, so that it was easy to make a day's visit to Paul Signac in the Bolle' little petrol-driven car that Valtat acquired from Signac in exchange for his painting " Le Cap Roux ".

In the spring and summer Louis Valtat went eagerly to Normandy, to get back to the seaside and above all to paint, staying in Port en Bessin, Arromanches, and later at Ouistreham.

In 1905 Valtat selected a place to stay during his visits to Paris on the Butte Montmartre, first in Rue Girardon and then Place Constantin Pecqueur, and finally settling in the Avenue de Wagram, close to the Arc de Triomphe.

As he was often absent from Paris, his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, had taken over responsibility for sending in his entries for the Salons; which is how Louis Valtat became involved in the uproar over "Fauvisme" at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, because one of his canvases was reproduced in the magazine "L'Illustration" next to paintings by Henri Manguin, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Jean Puy.

From 1914 there were no more winters in Esterel he came to miss the pleasures of having a garden.

Ten years later he bought a house in Choisel, a little village in the Valle'de Chevreuse, where he spent most of the year. His garden, and the flowers and fruit that he grew there, became the principle subjects of his. He contiuned to paint there until his death in 1952 in Paris.