Louis Paul Dessar was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and when he was six years old he moved to New York
City with his parents. As a child he showed an interest in art, and in 1883 he enrolled at the National Academy of Design. During the second half of the 1880s and for most of the 1890s, Louis Paul Dessar was active in France, where he studied in Paris at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and maintained a summer house at Etaples in the Fontainebleau region. During these years, he painted portraits in New York in the winter and in the summer, the French countryside and its rural inhabitants, including peasants, fishermen, shepherds, or others enjoying leisure time in the country. Many of Dessar’s works from this period beautifully capture the moody light effects of dusk and moonlight.

Dessar purchased an estate in Lyme in 1901 and remained there until just before his death. Throughout the 1920s, he maintained his New York studio and spent time there during some winters. Dessar’s paintings from his Lyme years are Tonalist landscapes in the Barbizon tradition, paintings inspired by the work of Henry Ward Ranger and other Lyme artists. In these later works, Dessar handles themes and moods similar to those found in his French paintings. On his estate in Lyme, for example, he kept livestock so that his subjects would be close at hand, and he continued to portray farmers toiling in the evening hours.