Charles Percier
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Charles Percier (Paris, August 22, 1764 - Paris, September 5, 1838) was a neoclassical French architect, interior decorator and designer, who worked in such close partnership with Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, originally his friend from student days, from 1794 onwards, that it is fruitless to disentangle artistic responsibilities in their work. Together, Percier and Fontaine were inventors and major proponents of the rich and grand, consciously archaeological version of neoclassicism we recognize as Empire style.
In 1784 Percier won the Prix de Rome, a government fellowship for study in Rome, where he met Fontaine. One early product of their collaboarion was Palais, maisons et autres édifices modernes dessinés à Rome which attracted the attention of prospective clients when they returned to Paris. At the end of 1792, in the first phase of the French Revolution Percier was appointed to supervise of the scenery at the Paris Opéra, a post that was at the center of innovative design. Fontaine returned from the security of London, where he had been exiled and they continued at the Opéra until 1796. Claude-Louis Bernier (1755 – 1830) was a third member of the team.
The calculated theater of Empire style, its aggressive opulence restrained by a slightly dry and correct sense of the Antique Taste, and its neo-Roman values that were both imperial and not connected to the ancien régime commended the style to Napoleon Bonaparte. He appointed them his personal architects and never wavered in his decision; they were at work on Imperial projects almost the very end. The partnership dissolved as Napoleon retired to Elba. They were too associated with the Empire ever to have an official commission under the Restauration. Percier thereafter conducted a student atelier. One of Percier's pupils, Auguste de Montferrand, designed Saint Isaac's Cathedral in St Petersburg for Tsar Alexander I.
They worked (1802–12) on the palace of the Louvre, which had not been a royal residence for generations and thus was free of recent Bourbon associations, and while stood in the heart of Paris, so that the Emperor could be seen coming and going, unlike Versailles, which had been rendered uninhabitable, not by chance, stripping of every furnishing in the series of sales during the Revolution that went on day after day for many months. No monarch would ever live there again.
They worked on the Tuileries Palace that faced the Louvre across squares and parterres.
In the extension of what is now the Axe historique of Paris, Percier and Fontaine designed the Arc du Carrousel (1807 - 8), commemorating Austerlitz,
They worked at Josephine's Malmaison and did alterations and decorations for former Bourbon Compiègne and Saint-Cloud and at Fontainebleau, another royal palace without recent ghosts.
Percier and Fontaine designed every detail in their interiors: state beds, sculptural side tables and other furniture, wall lights and candlesticks, chandeliers, door hardware, textiles and wallpaper. On a special occasion, Percier might be called upon to design for the Sèvres porcelain manufactory; in one case a grand vase in the Greek taste, the "Londonderry Vase" (Art Institute of Chicago), was just finished in 1814; Louis XVIII quickly gave to the Marquess of Londonderry during the Congress of Vienna. They published several later books, especially Recueil de décoration intérieure concernant tout ce qui rapporte à l'ameublement (1812) with its engravings in a spare outline technique, engravings that spread their style beyond the Empire and were influential in putting a French stamp on the English Regency style and influenced the connoisseur-designer Henry Hope.
