Hamon came from a modest background and received a municipal stipend to study art, enrolling in the École des Beaux-Arts in 1842. Soon after, he joined the atelier of Charles Gleyre who would later count future Impressionists, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley as pupils. Hamon also worked as a designer at the royal porcelain manufacture at Sèvres. Although he enjoyed modest success after his painting, My Sister Isn’t There (1853), was purchased by the Empress Eugénie, his reputation waned, possibly due to the nature of his works—often disconcerting and sometimes tinged with darker undercurrents but always original. There are few painters whose careers are as full of good as that of Hamon; there are few in our age who are more generally known. His pictures are in all countries. France has the smallest number of them. . .Hamon was not intriguing; ambitious only for his art, he knew not how to employ the means by which one rises to all distinctions. He remained nonetheless, as an original personality, as a marked personality of our epoch. . .His death has taken a master from us. –Walther Fol, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February, 1875