Albert Lynch was born 26th September 1860 in Gleisweiler, in the Rhineland Palatinate of southwest Germany. His father Diego was from a Peruvian family of merchants of Irish ancestry who had settled in Paris, and his mother, Adele Koeffler, was the daughter of a German landscape painter, Thomas Koeffler, who was living and working in Paris in the 1850’s.

Lynch enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was, subsequently, a pupil of Gabriel Ferrier, (1847–1914), a painter of portraits who was to prove particularly influential stylistically. He exhibited at the Salon from 1879 and was awarded a third-class medal in 1890, a first-class medal in 1892 and a gold medal at the 1900 Universelle Exposition. In 1901 he was appointed a Chevalier de Legion d’Honneur.

In 1896 Lynch married Marie Anne Bacquel in Paris where he had established himself as a highly successful painter of interior scenes and portraits, elegantly dressed women in a fashionably Belle Époque style. In 1930 he and his wife moved to Monaco where he died in 1950.

In addition to painting, Lynch was a successful book illustrator, including Guy de Maupassant’s Two Brothers (1889), Alexander Dumas, The Lady with the Camelias (1889) and Octave Uzanne, Frenchwoman of the Century (1887).

Some references exist to Albert Lynch being born in Lima and it is thought that Lynch himself was happy to go along with this to counter any anti German sentiments directed at his family following the Franco Prussian war.

Works by Albert Lynch can be found in public collections worldwide including those in New York, Chicago, The Clark Institute Williamstown, Lima, Auckland, Sydney, Manchester and London.