Jules Achille Noël

His father was a draftsman working on the canal being built from Nantes to Brest and gave him his first drawing lessons.

Afterwards, he went to Paris to seek his fortune and came under the influence of his fellow Breton painter Pierre-Julien Gilbert.

[2] After four years of struggling to earn his living, he returned to Brittany to teach drawing in Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Lorient and Nantes.

He had begun to participate in the Salon in 1840 and, in 1845, was one of several artists commissioned to provide engraved illustrations for a book on prisons by Maurice Alhoy entitled Les Bagnes: historie types, mystères....[2] Eventually, his work attracted the attention of Prince Louis, Duke of Nemours, who obtained him a position as a Professor of Design at the Lycée Henri-IV, where he would teach from 1847 until his retirement in 1879.

The Musée des beaux-arts de Quimper presented a major retrospective of his works in 2005.