Loiseau was attracted to drawing and watercolour painting from his early youth. He was apprenticed to an interior decorator, but he left the profession to pursue painting after receiving an inheritance from his grandmother. He enrolled in the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1888, and in 1889 studied at the studio of Fernand Quignon, who encouraged him to go to Pont-Aven. He arrived there in May 1890 and met Gauguin, Maufra and Emile Bernard. Encouraged by Maufra, he exhibited his paintings at Galerie Le Barc in Boutteville in 1891 and at the Salon des Indépendants in 1893. Between 1890 and 1896 he participated in several exhibitions of post-impressionist painters. From 1897 he was under contract with Durand-Ruel, who showed the artist’s paintings in his New York gallery in 1900 and in Paris the following year. Though Loiseau’s early works bear the imprint of Gauguin’s cloisonnism, he took a more post-impressionist direction around 1895, under the influence of Pissaro, and later explored Seurat’s divisionism.
While the almost geometric composition of his paintings was a clear legacy of cloisonnism, he contributed a more supple touch to post-impressionism by developing the "cross-hatched" style that became his hallmark. In several of his landscapes and seascapes, Loiseau, like Henri-Edmond Cross, daringly juxtaposed dabs of contrasting colours that were rarely used in painting at the time. He is known chiefly for scenes of Paris and views of the Seine River, the cliffs of Dieppe and the Dordogne valley.
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