Noel Nouet was a contemporary shin hanga artist born in Brittany, France, on March 30, 1885. Little is known of Nouet's formative years. However, it can be surmised that early encounters with woodblock prints came from his mother's collection of works by legendary ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige. 

At the age of fifteen, Nouet left his hometown and moved to Paris, where he encountered various Japanese artists traveling abroad. In 1926, he traveled to Japan and worked as a high school teacher in Shizuoka Prefecture before becoming a professor at the School for Foreign Languages in Tokyo in 1930. There, Nouet often walked the streets of Ginza sketching cityscapes. Such images were later submitted and featured in French and Japanese newspapers. The Japan Times, for example, published a collection of drawings, Tokyo: Fifty Sketches, from 1934 to 1935. That same year, Nouet met hanmoto publisher Doi, and the two agreed to work in collaboration. 

From 1935 to 1938, Doi translated over two dozen prints into shin hanga formatting, including Nouet's monochromatic Gate of Zojoji Temple and Kikyo Gate of the Emperor's Palace (1935), as well as Ten Views of Toyko (1936). Such images contained deeply romanticized views of Showa-era Tokyo and were highly popular among Westerners. Concluding his work with Doi, Nouet served as director of La Maison Franco-Japonaise and a lecturer at Tokyo University throughout the 1930s and 1940s. With the onset of WWII, Nouet chose to remain in Japan. 

From 1946 to 1948, he published a book of drawings called Tokyo: Fifty Sketches in addition to several volumes on Japanese history. In 1951 he was chosen to tutor the young Emperor Akihito in French. Nine years later, in 1960, Nouet returned to his native France before passing away the following year.