Born in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Prosper Louis Senat studied with Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904) at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, in Antwerp, Belgium, and at the South Kensington School of Art in London. He exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1877 to 1887, at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1877 to 1883, 1886 and 1888, and at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1882 to 1885. Senat was chiefly interested in coastal and marine subjects. He worked along the Atlantic coast of Maine and Massachusetts, and New Jersey, and painted in Belgium, Brittany, England, France, Holland, Sicily, and Nova Scotia. He lived in Pasadena, California, from 1905 to 1910, and often worked in Bermuda between 1895 and 1925. Senat died in Germantown.