Charles Percier 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.
Charles Percier. Portrait by Robert Lefèvre (1807)
View of a Roman House (watercolor)
Arc du Carrousel
The Empire style is an early-nineteenth-century design movement in architecture, furniture, other decorative arts, and the visual arts, representing the second phase of Neoclassicism. It flourished between 1800 and 1815 during the Consulate and the First French Empire periods, although its life span lasted until the late-1820s. From France it spread into much of Europe and the United States.
The Arc de Triomphe of the Place de l'Étoile, one of the most famous examples of Empire architecture, commissioned in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz by Emperor Napoleon I
Detail of Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel from Paris, with a pair of winged Victories
A pair of sphinxes with an amphora between them, surrounded by rinceaux and palmettes, on a washstand (athénienne or lavabo)
The top of an Egyptian Revival pylon-shaped coin cabinet, with a cornice and a winged sun