Louis Hector Leroux was a French painter in the academic style, affiliated by critics with the Néo-Grecs movement in art. He specialized in meticulously researched paintings of ancient Rome, especially depictions of women. He was best known for a series of some thirty paintings which spanned his entire career, depicting Vestal virgins. His daughter, Laura Leroux-Revault, was also a painter.

Néo-Grec was a Neoclassical Revival style of the mid-to-late 19th century that was popularized in architecture, the decorative arts, and in painting during France's Second Empire, or the reign of Napoleon III (1852–1870). The Néo-Grec vogue took as its starting point the earlier expressions of the Neoclassical style inspired by 18th-century excavations at Pompeii, which resumed in earnest in 1848, and similar excavations at Herculaneum. The style mixed elements of the Graeco-Roman, Pompeian, Adam and Egyptian Revival styles into "a richly eclectic polychrome mélange." "The style enjoyed a vogue in the United States, and had a short-lived impact on interior design in England and elsewhere."