Jean-Valentin Morel was born in Paris in 1794, on the rue aux Fèves on the Île de la Cité, the son of the lapidary Valentin Morel, whose family came from Chiomonte in Piedmont; his mother's family, the Girards and Mauziés, were silversmiths. He learned stone cutting from his father and was apprenticed to the goldsmith Adrien Vachette, known for gold boxes. He opened his own business in 1818, registered his first mark in 1827, and specialised in fine inlay and hardstone cups in a revival of sixteenth-century style.
After illness forced him to close for a year, he became head of Jean-Baptiste Fossin's workshop in 1834. In 1842 he went into partnership with the goldsmith Henri Duponchel as Morel et Cie, which quickly won an international name, making ornamental vases, jewellery, table silver, a missal binding for Pope Gregory XVI and works for the future William III of the Netherlands, the future Alexander II of Russia and the Duc de Luynes; it won a gold medal at the 1844 Paris exhibition. The partnership broke down, and a lawsuit Duponchel brought in 1848 stopped Morel working in Paris.
He went into partnership with Jules Fossin and moved to London, opening on New Burlington Street near Garrard. He found English clients hard to win but was supported by French exiles of 1848 and received a warrant from Queen Victoria. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 he won a Council Medal, and his bloodstone cup for the collector Henry Thomas Hope won the grand medal at the 1855 Paris Exposition universelle; the Musée d'Orsay bought the Hope Cup at Sotheby's in 2024. He left London at the end of 1852 for a workshop at Sèvres, was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1855, and died in Paris in 1860 in financial difficulty. His son Prosper (1825–1908) carried on; Prosper's daughter Blanche-Marie married Joseph Chaumet.
Correction: Casadi's earlier record said Morel ran a London workshop for the Fossin house from 1848 to 1860; Wikipedia places the London business from 1848 to 1852. The marriage of Blanche-Marie Morel and Joseph Chaumet is dated 1875 by French Wikipedia and 1885 by English Wikipedia.