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The earliest influences on Lévy-Dhurmer were historical; his first works were compared to paintings from the Florentine renaissance and may well have been inspired by a trip to Italy in 1895. Among these may be cited his Medusa and Circé and other images that pay tribute to the sinuous forms of Botticelli's Venus and her attendants. The artist made no effort to mimic Quattrocento painting styles, however, and his technique remained firmly rooted in post-impressionism, with obvious references to the late symbolist style of Henri Fantin-Latour. His choice of religious images such as the ethereal Eden of 1900 does not indicate a positive attachment to spirituality but rather an excuse to reinterpret an ancient subject.
At the same time, one of his most dramatic works, La Bourrasque (the gust of wind), which he painted for the first time in 1896 and treated in different formats in both oils and pastels, owes nothing to the past. It is a brilliant and disturbing image of a woman caught in a sudden storm: she holds her hands to her ears, her mouth open in shock and terror while the autumn leaves are swept past. His first teachers, Collin, Viot and Wallet seem to have left only a modest legacy in his subsequent work; the extent to which he was influenced by Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau can only be measured in considering those paintings which demonstrate an obvious visual debt.
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In 1901 he traveled to Spain and thence to Holland and Brittany, where Gauguin had first idealized the Breton peasant in raw color, inspiring both Maurice Denis and Albert Besnard. Lévy-Dhurmer, however, preferred a more refined technique and his portrayal of Breton peasant life may be better compared to the works of Bastien-Lepage and Dagnan-Bouveret.
His next journey, to Morocco, further broadened his horizons and a hint of Orientalist fantasy frequently reoccurs in much of his subsequent work. Traveling in North Africa and then Turkey he made greater use of pastels, easier to carry and use when traveling, and they remained a favored medium throughout his subsequent career. In the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century he produced much of his best work, notably Les Aveugles de Tanger, 1901 (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), and the Mère Bretonne (Musée de Brest).
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His attempts to translate the aural images of musical idiom into two dimensional expression on canvas was an innovative contribution to symbolist art. While Fantin-Latour had been inspired by the works of Wagner (among others), Lévy-Dhurmer's response and interpretation is less textual.
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