Henri Martin (1860-1943) was one of the most celebrated French Post-Impressionist painters of his generation, known for his luminous Neo-Impressionist landscape paintings. Born in Toulouse, France, Martin began studying art in 1877 at the age of seventeen at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse under Jules Garipuy and Henri-Eugène Delacroix, and later in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens. His first solo exhibition came at the age of twenty-six, three years after medaling for the first time at the Paris Salon.

Martin would then move to Italy, where he was heavily influenced by the Quattrocento painter Masaccio and by the late medieval architecture and frescoes of Giotto. Italy's landscape and architecture would ultimately influence Martin equally, and his engagement with the great early Italian painterly tradition gave his mature work a compositional gravity that distinguished it from many of his French Post-Impressionist contemporaries. He adopted a distinctive divisionist technique, applying paint in fine, feathery touches that blend from a distance into luminous atmospheric fields, and he became one of the leading practitioners of a softer, more romantic version of Neo-Impressionism.

Martin won the gold medal at the Salon of 1898, the same year he entered the Legion of Honor. The following year he won the Grand Prize at the Paris World's Fair. Martin exhibited widely throughout his career, achieved the highest awards, and received numerous prestigious commissions. In 1895 he painted a mural for Paris City Hall, and another for the Capitole in Toulouse about ten years later, monumental public commissions that placed him at the very top of his profession.

Martin later chose the seclusion of the country, purchasing a mansion overlooking Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot Valley of southwestern France. Inspired by the environment surrounding the property, his painting flourished, producing some of his best work. He remained in the mansion until his death in 1943, and the terraced gardens, poplars, and warm sunlight of the region became the setting for many of the most beloved paintings of his mature career. His son, the painter Jacques Martin-Ferrières, would carry the family's painterly tradition forward into the next generation.