Jean Chalgrin
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Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin (1739 – January 21, 1811) was a French architect, best known for his design for the Arc de Triomphe, Paris.
His neoclassic orientation was established from his early studies with the prophet of neoclassicism Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni and with the radical classicist Étienne-Louis Boullée in Paris and his Prix de Rome sojourn (November 1759—May 1763) as a pensionnaire of the French Academy in Rome. His time in Rome coincided with a fervent new interest in Classicism among the young French pensionnaires, under the influences of Piranesi and the publications of Winckelmann.
Returning to Paris, he was quickly given an appointment as an inspector of public works for the city of Paris, under the architect Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux, whose own time at the French Academy in Rome had predisposed him to the new style. In this official capacity he oversaw the construction of Ange-Jacques Gabriel's Hôtel Saint-Florentin in the rue Saint-Florentin, where Chalgrin was able to design the neoclassical gateway to the cour d'honneur.
In 1775 he was appointed First Architect to the comte de Provence, brother of Louis XVI; he designed the pavilion of the comtesse de Provence at Versailles. In 1779 he was appointed overseer of the building projects of another brother of the king, the comte d'Artois.
In 1777 Chalgrin partly remodelled the Church of Saint-Sulpice, which had been given a thoroughly neoclassical façade by Chalgrin's former master Servandoni over forty years before. In his Church of St. Philippe-du-Roule, built 1772-84 but designed about 1764 (Eriksen), he revived a basilica plan that had not been characteristic of French ecclesiastical architecture since the sixteenth century.
After the Revolution Chalgrin extended the Collège de France and made alterations in the Palais du Luxembourg to suit it to its new use as the seat of the Directoire.
The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon to commemorate the victorious armies of the Empire. The project was under way when Chalgrin died.
Chalgrin married a daughter of the painter Joseph Vernet.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Svend Eriksen, Early Neo-Classicism in France (London: Faber & Faber), 1974. Chalgrin's biography p 163.
[edit] Further reading
- Louis Hautcoeur, Histore de l'architecture classique en France, vol. IV second moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris) 1952. pp 212-19.
- Michel Gallet, Demeures parisiennes, époque Louis XVI (Paris) 1964. p. 177.
