Charles Percier

Charles Percier ([ʃaʁl pɛʁsje]; 22 August 1764 – 5 September 1838) was a neoclassical French architect, interior decorator and designer, who worked in a close partnership with Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, originally his friend from student days. For work undertaken from 1794 onward, trying to ascribe conceptions or details to one or other of them is fruitless; it is impossible to disentangle their cooperative efforts in this fashion. Together, Percier and Fontaine were inventors and major proponents of the rich, grand, consciously-archaeological versions of neoclassicism we recognise as Directoire style and Empire style.

Following Charles Percier's death in 1838, Fontaine designed a tomb in their characteristic style in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Percier and Fontaine had lived together as well as being colleagues. Fontaine married late in life and after his death in 1853 his body was placed in the same tomb according to his wishes.

Percier was born at Paris in 1764. In 1784, at age nineteen, he won the Prix de Rome, a government-funded fellowship for study in Rome. There he met Fontaine. One early product of their collaboarion was Palais, maisons et autres édifices modernes dessinés à Rome ("A palace, houses and other modern buildings designed in Rome"), which attracted the attention of prospective clients when they returned to Paris. At the end of 1792, near the end of the first phase of the French Revolution, Percier was appointed to supervise the scenery at the Paris Opéra, a post at the center of innovative design. Fontaine returned from the security of London, where he had been exiled, and they continued at the Opéra together until 1796. Claude-Louis Bernier (1755–1830) was a third member of their team.

Napoleon Bonaparte liked their work. The calculated theater of the Empire style, its aggressive opulence restrained by a slightly dry and correct sense of the antique taste, and its neo-Roman values, imperial yet separate from the ancien régime, appealed to the future emperor. He appointed them his personal architects and never wavered in his decision; they were at work on imperial projects almost until the very end of Napoleon's time in power. The relationship only dissolved when Napoleon retired to Elba. After the restoration of the House of Bourbon in 1814, they found themselves associated too intimately with the Empire ever to earn an official commission again. From that time forward, Percier conducted a student atelier, a teaching studio or workshop. One of Percier's pupils, Auguste de Montferrand, designed Saint Isaac's Cathedral in St Petersburg for Tsar Alexander I.

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