A pupil of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774-1833), he won the Prix de Rome for history painting in 1817.After a brief Neo-classical phase, he succumbed to a wide range of influences, including Romantic literature.

He received several important public commissions, including paintings for the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, Paris, for the Louvre and for the historical museum at Versailles. Until he retired from his post in 1863, he was a dedicated teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he had many pupils, including Meissonier and Papety. Cogniet's Tintoretto painting his dead Daughter (1843; Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts) became one of the most famous modern paintings in nineteenth-century France.