Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher, part of a family of painters, son of Hendrik Kobell. He was orphaned before he was one and was brought up in an orphanage in Utrecht. He studied there with the animal painter Willem Rutgaart van der Wall (1756-1813). In 1805 he became a member of the Utrecht painters' association, and in 1807, together with Pieter Christoffel Wonder, he undertook the direction of the Kunstliefde ('Love of art society'), which they had founded in that year. From 1810 to 1812 Kobell worked in Paris; he settled in Amsterdam in 1813 and died there shortly afterwards in an asylum for the insane. //