Gustave Courtois was born in 1852 in the tiny town of Pusey in eastern France, about 35 miles north of Besançon. He was raised by his single mother, Jeanne Jobard, a laundress who hardly made enough money to pay the bills. Thanks to his remarkable artistic talent, he received a scholarship in the spring of 1869 to join the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a renowned Orientalist painter and professor at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.