René-Louis Chrétien — born Marie Louis René Chrétien on 2 October 1867 in Choisy-le-Roi, just south of Paris — was a French painter whose output ranged across landscape, genre and still life. He came from a family of artists: his father, Auguste Clément Chrétien, was himself a painter, and it was under his father's eye that the young Chrétien first learned to handle a brush. Painting came early and naturally to him, and by his late teens he was ready for formal training in the Parisian ateliers.
He went on to study with three of the most established academic masters of the day: Léon Bonnat, the celebrated portraitist and teacher; Gustave Boulanger, a pillar of academic classicism; and Jules-Élie Delaunay, known for his history painting and murals. This grounding gave Chrétien the disciplined draughtsmanship and refined tonal sense that underpin his work — qualities as evident in his open-air landscapes as in his interiors.
Chrétien made his Salon debut remarkably young, exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1887 at the age of nineteen. He would remain a fixture of the Salon for more than half a century, showing there until 1940. Official recognition followed steadily: an honourable mention in 1889, a third-class medal in 1894, and a second-class medal in 1895, after which he was placed hors concours — exempt from further competition, a mark of established standing. The crowning distinction came at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he was awarded a silver medal.

Alongside his figure and genre subjects, Chrétien was a sensitive painter of the French countryside. His landscapes show a feeling for changing light and atmosphere and for the quiet rhythms of rural life — harvest fields with their stooks of wheat, winding country roads, distant hamlets and hazy summer horizons. Handled with a loose, broken touch and a bright, sunlit palette, works of this kind reveal an artist attentive to the plein-air currents of his generation, capturing the shimmer of heat and the texture of stubble and grass with real freshness. Coastal and working scenes, such as his shrimp-fisherwomen of the Calvados coast, extend the same observant, out-of-doors sensibility.
His personal life was interwoven with the art world. In 1894 he married Marie Olympe Roche, who died in 1912; the following year he married the painter Clotilde Clémence Colombe. Chrétien was also an influential teacher, counting among his pupils the Brazilian painter Pedro Alexandrino Borges.

His reputation was solid enough that his work entered numerous French regional museums — among them Amiens, Caen, Dijon, Grenoble, Reims, La Rochelle and Saint-Étienne — as well as institutions abroad in Liège, São Paulo and Auckland. He is documented in the standard reference works, including Bénézit and Thieme-Becker.

Chrétien died on 28 December 1945 at Rochefort-en-Yvelines, aged seventy-eight. (Some art-market sources give 1942, but French civil records support 1945.) He is valued today as an accomplished and versatile painter of the late nineteenth-century French tradition.