A pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and Emile-François Michel, Antoine Calbet also studied with the genre painter Edouard Antoine Marsal. He made his public exhibition debut at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1880, and continued to take part in the Paris Salons until 1940. A gifted watercolourist as well as a portrait and genre painter, Calbet had a particular penchant for studies of languid female nudes.

He also worked as a decorative painter, counting among his public commissions the decoration of several theatres, as well as the buffet restaurant in the Gare de Lyon in Paris and the restaurant La Grande Taverne in Dijon, for which he painted a Scène de Brasserie.