Marie-Joseph Peyre

Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730 – 11 August 1785) was a French architect who designed in the neoclassical style.

He began his training in Paris with Jacques-François Blondel at l'École des Arts, where he met Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni and formed a lifelong friendship with Charles De Wailly. He won the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1751 and was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome from 1753, where he was soon joined by De Wailly, the following year's winner, who brought with him Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux, whose sister Peyre eventually married. Peyre stayed in Rome until early in 1756, during the years when the students at the Academy were creating temporary projects in the new neoclassical manner.

In 1762 he built a villa for Mme Leprêtre de Neubourg in the southwest suburbs of Paris near the Gobelins; demolished in 1909, it is known only through the engravings in his Oeuvres d'architecture and two photographs taken in 1900 by Eugène Atget. It was an exercise in a purely Palladian manner, (Eriksen 1974:212, and pl. 48) quite unlike anything else done in France at that time.

In 1765 he produced a volume of Oeuvres d'Architecture de Marie-Joseph Peyre, which he dedicated, as "the fruit of my studies in Italy", to the marquis de Marigny, Pompadour's brother, who had been carefully trained for his popsition as Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi, and was attuned to the new classicism in the arts. Peyre interspersed his own work with carefully drawn views and sections of Roman monuments, such as a reconstruction of the tomb of Caecilia Metella, not as it was to be seen in Rome, but as it had originally been connstructed. Peyre included grand designs for an academy and for a cathedral that was quickly identifiable as a "purified" neoclassical rendering of St. Peter's. Peyre's volume added to the repertory of architectural design that fed Neoclassicism. A mark of its continued usefulness was its reissue in 1795, after his death, with a Supplement, composé d'un Discours sur les monuments des anciens and its use by the English architect John Soane. Partly on the credibility the publication lent him, Peyre was named architect at Fontainebleau in 1772, jointly with his friend Charles De Wailly.

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