Jules Noel

JULES NOËL Nancy 1810 – 1881 Algiers Jules Noël was born at Nancy in Lorraine, eastern France on 4th January 1810. In 1814 the family moved to Quimper in Brittany, the area with which Jules all his life identified himself, later declaring that he was born in Quimper. His father was a supervisor of work on the canal being built from Nantes to Brest and the draughtsmen on this project may well have given Jules his first drawing lessons. He studied at Louis-Gabriel Charioux’s Académie de Peinture et de Dessin in Brest before going to Paris, where he attended the atelier of the neoclassical painter Jean-Victor Bertin and scratched a living drawing caricatures. Noël exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1840 to 1879. In 1835 Noël returned to Brittany, teaching drawing in Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Lorient and Nantes, as well as embarking upon a career as a marine painter. In 1839 Noël settled in Nantes, where he attracted the patronage of Prince Louis, Duc de Nemours, the second son of King Louis-Philippe, who commissioned him to paint his monumental Le Duc et la Duchesse de Nemours en rade de Brest (Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles), shown at the Salon of 1844. The Duc recommended Noël for the post of Professor of Design at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris. He taught there from 1847 until his retirement in 1879. Among his pupils were the portrait and genre painter Albert Lynch (1851-1912) and the printmaker Félix Buhot (1847-1898). Noël alternated his teaching duties with trips to Brittany, Normandy and further afield: in 1875 he was in Geneva. A brilliant draughtsman and watercolourist as well as a painter in oils, Noël made views of picturesque Breton towns, or more often its coastline, in a lively, fluid style. Some of these views have genre and historical elements, as in L’arrivée de la diligence à Quimper-Corentin sous le Directoire, 1873 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper), where the figures are in eighteenth century costume. Noël won a medal at the Salon in 1853 and in 1870 was made an Officier d’Académie. In 1880 he went to Algiers to live with his daughter Maria-Dina and her husband, dying there the following year. The work of Jules Noël is represented in the Louvre, Paris; the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon; the Musée Départmental Breton, Quimper; the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. Bibliography Quimper, Musée des Beaux-Arts/Dieppe, Château-Musée, Jules Noël, 2005-6, exh. cat by Alain Boulaire, Pierre Ickowicz and Eric de Thévenard.