Victor Baltard

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Victor Baltard (June 9, 1805–January 13, 1874), French architect, who was born in Paris, son of architect Louis Baltard.

Until 1833, Baltard studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he garnered the Prix de Rome for designing a military school in 1833. He went on to study at the Académie de France in Rome, Italy, from 1834 to 1838 under the direction of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. From 1849 on, he was the municipal architect of Paris. In this function, he was responsible for the restoration of several churches, as well as the construction of St. Augustin (1860–1867), in which he united the structural values of stone and steel. His most popular achievement was, however, the building of les Halles, the central market in Paris, during the years 1851 to 1857. In 1972 and 1973, however, these halls were torn down again. A single hall (completed in 1854) was classified as a historical monument and moved to Nogent-sur-Marne in 1971, where it is now known as the Pavilion Baltard.

Victor Baltard also built the slaughter houses and the cattle market of Les Halles de la Villette, as well as the tombs of composer Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wely at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise and jurist Léon Louis Rostand at the Cimetière de Montmartre. He was largely instrumental in introducing a regular scheme of fresco decoration by modern artists in the churches of Paris, to take the place of the heterogeneous collections of pictures of all kinds with which their walls had been promiscuously decorated.