Born in Durham and educated at Tavistock Grammar School in Devon where he acquired the interest in Conchology on which he would later write several papers. His father, George Fife Angas (1789-1879), a merchant and banker, held several important public posts. George French Angas worked briefly in a counting house in London and then took art lessons. A tour of the Mediterranean in 1841 resulted in the first of several well known books of lithographs. In 1843 he sailed to South Australia and immediately joined an expedition to the Murray River and the Coorong. He travelled widely in New Zealand and in 1845 held exhibitions in Adelaide and Sydney. He also visited the Illawarra region before returning to England in 1846.
These trips appear to have inspired him with an interest in entomology and he is recorded to have sent beetles to the NHM from New Zealand, (1847), Turkey (1849) and South Africa (1848). In 1850 Angas and his wife emigrated to South Australia, where his father had settled two years earlier and he opened a studio in Adelaide. Later he served a term as Director and Secretary of the Government Museum in Sydney before returning to South Australia in 1860. In 1861 he made a further donation of Coleoptera from this area to the NHM.
In 1863 he and his family returned to England and he lived in London for the rest of his life. Here, the writer of his obituary in Proc.Linn.Soc.Lond. 1887, 33-34. reported that his main interest was natural history rather than art and he was an active member of the Linnean Society. It is not known whether he continued to collect beetles at this time.
FRGS, FLS (1866). (MD 8/17, 1/22)