[1][2] He was trained to draw in his home town between 1815 and 1818 before moving to Paris, where he studied painting from 1822 onwards under Antoine-Jean Gros at the École des Beaux-Arts.
[1] He exhibited some paintings and drawings at the Paris Salon between 1833 and 1850, but principally showed lithographs,[1] for which he was known.
[3] He produced lithographs of other artists, like George Henry Hall's Cours de Dessin.
[5] In Landor's Cottage, Edgar Allan Poe describes Julien's work, "One of these drawings was a scene of Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness; another was a carnival piece, spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head—a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate, never before arrested my attention.
"[5] In 1854, he made a full-bust portrait of George Washington, after Gilbert Stuart, and the lithograph is in the art collection of Mount Vernon.