Louis Hérisson (1811-1859) was a French landscape painter associated with the Barbizon School, the influential circle of nineteenth century painters who transformed the direction of European landscape art through their direct engagement with the forest and countryside surrounding the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. Working during the formative decades of the movement, Hérisson belonged to the generation of French artists who rejected the idealized conventions of academic landscape painting in favor of a more honest and observational approach to the natural world.

Like his fellow Barbizon painters, Hérisson drew his subjects from the woods, meadows, streams, and rural life of the Fontainebleau region and the wider French countryside. The Barbizon painters, led by such figures as Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, Charles-François Daubigny, and Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, worked directly from nature, painting sketches out of doors and developing finished canvases in the studio that retained the atmospheric truth of the sites they depicted. Hérisson's practice belonged to this shared enterprise, and his paintings reflect the movement's characteristic attention to natural light, weather, and the intimate poetry of unspectacular rural scenery.

The Barbizon painters played a decisive role in reshaping the European landscape tradition, moving away from the classical formulas of the preceding generation and preparing the ground for the Impressionist revolution that would follow later in the century. As a participant in this shared undertaking, Hérisson contributed to the broader effort that established landscape painting as a serious and independent branch of French art during the mid nineteenth century.

Hérisson's relatively brief career, cut short by his death in 1859, has left him a less prominent figure than the leading Barbizon masters. Nevertheless, his paintings retain the sincerity of observation and the quiet tonal harmonies that characterize the Barbizon vision at its best, and they continue to be valued as authentic examples of one of the most significant movements in nineteenth century French landscape painting.