Louis Valtat was born on August 8, 1869 in Dieppe, Seine - Maritime, in the Normandy region of France, into a wealthy family of ship owners. Valtat spent many of his childhood years in Versailles, a suburb of Paris, where he attended secondary school at the Lycée Hoche (near the Palace of Versailles). Encouraged by his father, an amateur landscape painter himself, Valtat became interested in art, and at age 17, deciding to pursue an artistic career, applied to the School of Fine Arts in Paris. After being accepted, in 1887, Valtat moved to Paris to enroll at the École des Beaux Arts de Paris, where he studied with the well known academic artists Gustave Boulanger (1824 – 1888), Jules Lefebvre (1836 – 1911), and later with Benjamin Constant (1845 – 1902).

After the Ecole, Valtat studied at the Académie Julian (Julian Academy) under Jules Dupré (1811 – 1889), a landscape painter of the Barbizon school. Among his fellow students were: Albert Andre (1869 – 1954), who became a close friend, as well as Maurice Denis (1870 – 1943), Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947), and Edouard Vuillard (1868 – 1940), who, at that time, were members of the Nabis movement. Calling themselves "Nabis" (after the Hebrew word meaning prophets), they were influenced by Paul Gauguin's (1848 – 1903) Synthetist method of painting based on the use of simple forms / lines, pure colors, and large patterns. While Valtat remained detached from that movement, he learned from them the Gauguin method of painting which would influence his later works.

In 1890, upon winning the Jauvin d’Attainville prize, Valtat established his own studio at rue La Glaciere in Paris. Valtat made his debut, in 1893, at the Salon of Independent Artists, displaying several paintings depicting street scenes of the neighborhood surrounding his art studio. One of those paintings, titled Sur Le Boulevard (On The Boulevard, 1893) was noted by the art critic Félix Fénéon. During this early period in his career, Valtat used the spontaneous light touches of Impressionism (although with bordered objects) and the colorful dots / points found in Pointillism. Two examples representing Valtat's work during this period include Péniches (Barges, 1892) and the Pommiers (The Apple Trees, 1894). As noted by Cogniat, Péniches has the impressionistic rendering of the mobile reflections of rippling water" while Pommiers is "alive with the dazzling brilliance of sunlit reds and yellows intensified by the stippled strokes of green".

Valtat exhibited widely during his career. In 1894, Louis Valtat collaborated with both Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec and Albert André in creating the decor for the Paris theater "L'Oeuvre" at the request of Lugné Poë.

Valtat suffered from tuberculosis, and he spent many autumn / winter seasons along the Mediterranean coast in Banyuls, Antheor and Saint - Tropez. Often, Valtat and his family would visit Paul Signac in Bollée and Auguste Renoir at the Maison de la Poste in Cagnes. During these times, along the Mediterranean, Valtat's use of color became a major concern to him, and he began to express his Fauvist tendencies, particularly in painting seascapes.