Angilbert Göbel was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1821. From 1836 to 1845 he received training as a reproduction engraver under Eugen Eduard Schäffer at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. He then travelled together with the painters Anton Burger and Philipp Rumpf to Belgium and Paris. With the painter Jacob Fürchtegott Dielmann, they formed the artists’ association Totenbund, turning to landscape painting in the Taunus and elsewhere.

In 1852 Burger, Rumpf and Göbel visited the painter Gustave Courbet in his Paris atelier. Following the failed Revolution of 1848 to 1849 the young artists were highly admiring of Courbet’s art and his political views. Göbel helped to organise Courbet’s third exhibition in Frankfurt in 1858. During Courbet’s subsequent stay in Frankfurt for several months he shared an atelier with Göbel and the painters Victor Müller and Otto Scholderer. While his painter friends moved to the Taunus and established the Kronberger Malerkolonie, a painters’ colony at Kronberg, Göbel stayed in Frankfurt, where he became a sought-after portrait painter. He died in Frankfurt in 1882.