Jules Achille Noël

Jules Achille Noël, whose real name was Louis Assez Noël, was born in Quimper on February 24, 1815 and died in Algiers on March 26, 1881. He was a French landscape and marine painter whose main areas of activity were Brittany and Normandy.
His family originally came from Lorraine, and there are some sources that date his year of birth there to 1810. His father, a draughtsman working on the construction of the canal from Nantes to Brest, gave him his first drawing lessons. He later studied at the “Académie de Peinture et de Dessin” (Académie Charioux) in Brest. He then moved to Paris to seek his fortune, where he was influenced by the Breton painter Pierre-Julien Gilbert. After four years of hard work in the capital, he returned to Brittany to teach drawing in Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Lorient and Nantes.
From 1840 he took part in the Salon and in 1845 was commissioned by Maurice Alhoy to produce illustrations for the book “Les Bagnes: historie types, mystères…”, which dealt with prisons. His work eventually attracted the attention of Prince Louis, Duke of Nemours, who offered him a position as professor of design at the Lycée Henri-IV. He taught there from 1847 until his retirement in 1879, with Albert Lynch and Félix Buhot among his best-known students.
During the school vacations, he returned to Brittany to paint. When he retired in poor health, he moved in with his daughter and her husband in Algeria, where he eventually died.
His painting style was often compared to that of Eugène Isabey, and he received praise from Baudelaire. In 2005, the Musée des beaux-arts de Quimper presented an extensive retrospective of his works.