Alcide Le Beau (1873-1943) was a French Post-Impressionist painter known for his finely observed landscapes of the French countryside, particularly the regions of Brittany and the Creuse Valley in central France. Born in Nantes, he trained within the academic traditions of late nineteenth-century French painting before gravitating toward the more progressive painterly currents that were reshaping French landscape art during his formative years. He developed a style that combined careful observation with a vivid sense of color and a clear engagement with the divisionist techniques being explored by Neo-Impressionist painters of his generation.

Le Beau became closely associated with the École de Crozant, the artists' colony that gathered in the picturesque Creuse Valley around the village of Crozant, where painters such as Armand Guillaumin, Léon Detroy, and other Post-Impressionists found rich subject matter in the dramatic landscapes, ruined castles, and changing seasonal light. Working alongside this community, Le Beau produced canvases that capture the rugged terrain, river valleys, and rural villages of the region with both atmospheric sensitivity and a sustained interest in broken color. His Breton subjects, by contrast, often turn toward the coast and the more austere terrain of western France, with paintings that record the particular silver light and rocky shore of that region.

Le Beau exhibited at the Paris Salon and at other important venues during his career, and his work found a steady audience among collectors of contemporary French landscape painting. He continued to paint until his death in 1943, having spent his career pursuing an independent path through the currents of French Post-Impressionism. His pictures are appreciated today as carefully crafted examples of regional French Post-Impressionism, preserving the quiet rural France that occupied so much of the artistic imagination of his generation. His paintings are held in French regional museums and in significant private collections around the world.