Roger Jourdain was the youngest son of a wealthy cloth merchant from Louviers, Normandy. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris (between 1860 and 1870), he moved at an early age via the Salon of his fashionable half-sister Marguérite in circles of well-known writers, painters and composers (Proust, Henri Regnault, John Singer Sargent, Debussy). He admired Manet and Velasquez and painted oriental subjects for a short time, before devoting himself definitively to genre scenes. Strongly attracted - like the Impressionists - to modern life, he paints the leisure activities of the French haute bourgeoisie, such as boat trips on the Seine, the beach in Villerville and intimate family scenes. In this example Jourdain  has chosen to paintin himself fishing most probably along the Seine, the technique is masterful and one can clearly see the influence of artists like Sargent particularly in the effortless dipiction of the artist and his rod.

In 2005, the Musée de Louviers organized a retrospective exhibition of the work of Roger Jourdain.