Boats Aground By Jules Noël, Brittany

Oil on panel, signed lower right.
Dimensions without frame 27 x 50 cm, with frame 46 x 68 cm.
Jules Noël (1810-1881):
Jules Noël was born to a Breton mother (Plougasnou) and a father from Meurthe-et-Moselle (Sornéville). Although born in Nancy, he spent a large part of his childhood in Finistère (Quimper then Lennon). He was the sixth of a family of eight children. It was his father who first introduced him to drawing, then he took lessons with Louis-Gabriel Charrioux, a professor from Brest, before moving to Paris and the teaching of Jean-Victor Bertin. It was the death of his father in 1835 that made him return to Brittany to teach drawing first in Saint-Pol-de-Léon, then in Lorient. It was there that he met Adèle Cécile Constance Caris, daughter of a bookseller from Lorient, who became his wife in 1837 and bore him two daughters. He learned his maritime knowledge from his brother-in-law Eugène Michaux, a naval lieutenant. Their first daughter was born in Nantes, and it was also in this city that he was introduced to the Duke of Nemours, which earned him his first commission from the latter and a recommendation to teach drawing at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris, where he moved in 1845. From 1840, he exhibited in almost all the Parisian salons and continued to participate until 1879. During school holidays, he traveled to Brittany (Auray and Hennebont, the region of his in-laws, as well as the port towns of Finistère) and Normandy to paint landscapes and seascapes. His reputation continued to grow. In 1849, he received an encouragement prize, and he was approached by the Minister of the Interior for a copy of a painting in the Louvre. It was in 1867, upon the death of his mother, that he signed it with an upside-down "N", as she did on these canvases. In 1874 his second daughter married the painter Gaston Roullet. Following health and financial problems, in 1877 he decided to join his eldest daughter in Algiers, where he died in 1881. From sketches taken on the spot, Jules Noël recomposed very lively paintings in his studio, thus mixing his love of landscapes with genre scenes accumulating many details. This work of recomposition in the studio often led him to transform the places according to his mood of the moment. Jules Noël is present in many museums such as Quimper, Brest, Vannes, Lille, Versailles, but also London.