Pinel was born on 9th June 1820 in Chauny, Aisne (north-east of Paris), the son of Jean Félix Pinel and Adélaïde Dupressoir. According to Bénézit, he was a student of Charles-Théodore Sauvageot (1826–1883) and of ‘Roulet’, presumably (Marie Anatole) Gaston Roullet (1847–1925). He was a painter of landscapes, city views and harbour scenes, based in Paris, where on 19th June 1849, he married Jean [sic] Petit, apparently in the church of the Madeleine or at least in its parish. He was then living at 400 Rue Saint Honoré and had equally fashionable Paris addresses in later life. Together with the fact that he was older than his teachers – and far more so than Roullet, who could only have taught him in the 1870s – this perhaps suggests that Pinel turned to art relatively late, when already financially secure, rather than making it his livelihood.
The 1891 electoral roll next places the artist at 90 Boulevard St Germain and while Bénézit dates his death to 1892, an online record suggests it may have occurred on 22nd March 1894 at 29 Rue du Moulin des Prés, (Paris 13), a less fashionable area but also a respectable one. There is little record of work by him in public holdings and dated examples are so far only noted from the mid-1870s. Port of Antwerp is in the Musée de Chambéry. Another, of the fortified walls and beach of St Malo (dated 1885), is in the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield, and appears to be the only example in a UK collection.
Summarised from Art UK's Art Detective discussion ‘Is the artist Armand Félicien Pinel (d.1892)? Can anyone identify the location and the buildings?'
Text source: Art Detective
