Joseph Raphael was among the most gifted American Impressionists of his generation, and one of the very few to carry the full language of European Impressionism home to the American West. Though he spent thirty-seven years abroad, California claims him still: it was there he was born, there he trained, and there, through a devoted San Francisco following, his luminous European canvases were seen year after year.
He was born on 2 June 1869 in Jackson, a mining town in the California Gold Country. At eighteen he entered the California School of Design in San Francisco, studying for a decade under Arthur Mathews and the sculptor Douglas Tilden, and supporting himself through the 1890s as a newspaper illustrator and sign-writer. A gold medal at the Mark Hopkins Institute in 1900 confirmed his promise, and in 1902 he sailed for Paris, enrolling first at the École des Beaux-Arts and then at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens, paying his way with magazine illustration.

His earliest mature works, painted during long spells in the Netherlands, were sombre and tonal, indebted to the Dutch genre masters. In this vein he painted La Fête du Bourgmestre, which won an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1906 and was bought by a group of San Francisco friends for the city's Art Association — the first of many gestures by which his home city kept faith with him. Soon, however, the proximity of the French Impressionists transformed his art: his palette lifted, his touch broadened, and he arrived at the free, high-keyed, near-divisionist manner for which he is loved.

In 1912 he married Johanna Jongkindt and settled at Uccle, a leafy suburb of Brussels, where his bountiful flower and vegetable garden became his great subject — shimmering, sun-struck landscapes and florals built from broken strokes of saturated colour and heavy impasto. His growing family of four daughters and a son peopled his figurative canvases. From 1913 his work was shown annually at the Helgesen Galleries in San Francisco, and honours followed on both sides of the Atlantic, among them silver and gold medals at the Panama-Pacific and Panama-California Expositions of 1915 and a gold medal from the San Francisco Art Association in 1918. He was an accomplished etcher and colour-woodcut printmaker besides, recording San Francisco, Sausalito and the Bay.

By the early 1930s Raphael and his family had moved to a suburb of Leiden, and he painted often in nearby Bruges. With war approaching in 1939 he returned at last to San Francisco, keeping a studio on Sutter Street until his death on 11 December 1950. His influence on Northern Californian painting was profound, for he had brought the living example of French Impressionism to the coast. His work is held today by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Portland Art Museum and the Monterey Museum of Art, among others.