Timeline

Upon winning the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1786, Charles Percier spent the next seven years as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France. Together with Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853), a fellow student of the architect Atoine-François Peyre, he sketched the monuments of ancient and modern Rome. Upon their return to Paris, Percier and Fontaine embarked on a long and successful collaboration, working closely together as architects and designers until about 1814. Together they published a number of books on architecture, ornament and furnishings, each accompanied by their illustrations. These were often collaborative efforts in which Percier drew the architectural and sculptural elements and Fontaine the landscapes and figures. These include the Palais, maisons, et autres edifices modernes, dessines a Rome, published in 1798 and followed three years later by their most influential work, the Recueil de decorations interieures. Percier’s first important official commission came in 1800, when he was asked by Josephine Bonaparte to take charge of the renovation and interior decoration of her villa at Malmaison. In later years both Percier and Fontaine worked extensively for Napoleon; at the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Compiègne, Fontainebleau and elsewhere, as well as designing such court festivities as the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor and his marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria. Indeed, such was their importance as architects and designers during the Napoleonic era that Percier and Fontaine can arguably be said to have created the Empire style.