Amans was born in Maastricht. Maastricht was a French city at the time. His father, Paul Serge Amans, was born in Narbonne in 1765. He was a French officer (Capitaine-Adjudant de place de 1ère classe à Maastricht) of Napoléon. Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans was trained in the French neoclassical tradition of portraiture. He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1831 to 1837. News of fellow-artist Jean Joseph Vaudechamp’s good fortune in finding patrons probably led Amans to visit Louisiana since the two artists traveled on the same ship from France to New Orleans in about 1837. Following Vaudechamp’s departure from Louisiana in 1839, Amans assumed the role as the most celebrated portraitist in Louisiana. In the mid-1840s he married Azoline Landreaux, the daughter of a St. Charles Parish sugar planter Pierre Honoré Landreaux and Joséphine Armant, and purchased Trinity Plantation on Bayou Lafourche. Amans and Azoline moved back to France in 1856 where he died in 1888, château de Lévis Saint Nom (78), never having returned to Louisiana.