Charles Percier

Architect, born in Paris, France. He studied with Pierre Fontaine in Rome, and together they developed the Empire style under the patronage of Napoleon I, in buildings and in interior decoration. Percier retired from his post on the downfall of Napoleon in 1814. He remained a lifelong friend of Fontaine, and they were buried in the same tomb.

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.

In 1784 Percier won the Prix de Rome, a government fellowship for study in Rome, where he met Fontaine.

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.

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.

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. 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.