English-born Australian painter and printmaker Henri van Raalte was born in London on 11 February 1881. He was educated at the City of London School, the Royal Academy and later in Belgium and the Netherlands. Among his instructors were John Singer Sargent, Herbert Dicksee, and George Clausen. In 1901, he was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, and in the same year had a picture hung at the Royal Academy exhibition. At twenty-one years-of-age, Modern Etching and Engraving published full-page reproductions of an etching and a dry-point by van Raalte for The Studio at London.

In 1910, van Raalte emigrated to Western Australia and began teaching art, including printmaking. His earliest works focused on Australian gum trees, for which he became recognized in Western Australia and which established him as an Australian artist, though it was some time before his work became known in the eastern states. He had an exhibition of his work in Perth in 1919 which was followed by another in Adelaide. Van Raalte founded in 1920 the Australian Painter-Etcher’s and Graphic Art Society. In 1922, he went to Adelaide where he was appointed curator of the Art Gallery of South Australia. He resigned in January 1926 after interference by Sir William Sowden, president of the Gallery's board, in the hanging of what Van Raalte considered “bad art.” 

Van Raalte then established a studio at Second Valley, South Australia. Though he suffered from severe depression, van Raalte was otherwise in good health. An exhibition of his work was planned at Adelaide about the end of 1929. On the 4^th of November of 1929 he was found in the grounds of his house shot through the head, and he died on the same day, apparently a suicide. He left behind a widow and three sons. 

Several exhibitions of van Raalte’s work have since been held in Australia, including a retrospective of his work in 1982 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Little is known of his painting in Australia but his etchings were widely collected and they are in the print-collections in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth and at the British Museum, London.