Charles de Wailly

Charles de Wailly (French pronunciation: ​[ʃaʁl də vaji]) (9 November 1730 – 2 November 1798) was a French architect and urbanist, and furniture designer, one of the principals in the Neoclassical revival of the Antique. His major work was the Théâtre de l'Odéon for the Comédie-Française (1779–82). In his designs, de Wailly showed a predilection for the perfect figure, the circle.

De Wailly was born in Paris. Starting in 1749, he was the pupil of Jacques-François Blondel at l'École des Arts, where he met William Chambers and had as a schoolmate Marie-Joseph Peyre; later he studied with Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni and with Jean-Laurent Le Geay. After having obtained the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1752 he went to the French Academy in Rome for three years until 1755, sharing his prize with his friend Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux. Both participated in the excavations at the Baths of Diocletian. In Rome, de Wailly founded a friendship with the sculptor Augustin Pajou, who was to carve his bust and that of his wife and for whom, in 1776, he would build a house adjoining his own, in Paris.

On his return to Paris de Wailly showed his mastery of the earliest version of neoclassicism, being called the "Goût grec", by exhibiting a table with a lapis lazuli top and gilt-bronze mounts and a granite vase in the "goût antique" at the Salon of 1761; they were designed to be manifestos of a new taste, as the squib inserted in the Mercure de France states, in a "very noble style, far removed from the frippery manner ("air de colifichet") which has reigned so long in our furnishings."

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