[2] His father, Diego Lynch, had been born in Chachapoyas, Peru in November 1812, the son of a family of merchants, and had moved to Paris in the late 1840s.

[4] The family returned to Paris, where Albert Lynch subsequently studied at l'École des Beaux-Arts, under the guidance of painters Jules Achille Noël, Gabriel Ferrier and Henri Lehmann.

He illustrated such books as Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac and La Parisienne by Henry Becque.

Lynch moved to Monaco in 1930, where he died in 1950, survived by his wife Marie Anna Victoria Bacouel, who he had married in Paris on 28 October 1896.

Given the strong anti-German feeling in Paris after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871, Lynch seems to have been happy to play up the Peruvian side of his background, and it seems to have become generally circulated that he had been born in Peru, in Lima or Trujillo.