Charles de Wailly

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Charles de Wailly (1789), bust by Augustin Pajou

Charles de Wailly

Théâtre de l'Odéon for the Comédie-Française
(1779–82). In his designs, de Wailly showed a predilection for the perfect figure, the circle.

Biography

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.

Panthéon
into a temple to the republic.

On his return to Paris, de Wailly showed his mastery of the earliest version of neoclassicism, being called 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."[2]

About 1764, for the sumptuous Hôtel d'Argenson de Voyer, which he remodelled for Marc-René d'Argenson, marquis de Voyez in an advanced neoclassical style, he designed the gilt-bronze mounted marble and porphyry vase on pedestal that is now in the Wallace Collection, London;[3] from de Wailly's drawings the sculptor Augustin Pajou made the wax models for the mounts.

In 1767, de Wailly was accepted as a member of the first class of the

Paris Salons his renderings, designs and models. He gained wider publicity when two of his designs were engraved for the Encyclopédie
and two more for the monumental Description de la france of the 1780s.

His reputation abroad grew through engravings of his works; he became particularly popular in Russia, where his disciples, some of whom went to Paris to study with him directly, included Vasily Bazhenov, Ivan Starov, and Andrey Voronikhin. Catherine the Great offered him a high post in the Imperial Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, which he refused.

Saint-Sulpice, Paris
, 1788-89

In 1772, he was named site architect of the

Château de Fontainebleau, jointly with Marie-Joseph Peyre. The following year, he was authorized to leave for a long stay in Genoa, to redecorate the seventeenth-century palace of Cristoforo Spinola in the Strada Nuova,[5]
working in tandem with Andrea Tagliafichi: the building was badly damaged in 1942. He was to return on several occasions to work in Italy.

Odéon
), long section and view of the vestibule, based on the second (1770) project

Noticed by the

Odéon in Paris (see below). De Wailly also designed a project for the Opéra-Comique
.

In 1795, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts – 3rd section (architecture), fauteuil V. With his death, Jean Chalgrin succeeded to his seat. He became conservator of the museum of painting in 1795 and was sent to the Netherlands and Belgium to select works of art after the annexation of these countries.

He married Adélaïde Flore Belleville who, after his death, remarried in 1800 to the chemist

Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy. He was the brother of lexicographer Noël François de Wailly
.

De Wailly died in Paris in 1798.

Works

France

Maison 57 rue La Boétie, Paris, 1776.
View of the Château de Montmusard. 1765 engraving by de Wailly.
Chateau de Montmusard: section and plan
Design for a new château in Enghien, 1781 (not realized)
Theatre of the Château de Seneffe, 1779. Elevation and plan.

Belgium

Royal Castle of Laeken.

Germany

  • Reorganisation of Kassel city center.

Russia

Notes

  1. ^ The "de" in the name "de Wailly" is not a nobiliary particle but finds its origin in the Flemish definite article "der".[citation needed] It is usual practice to refer to him as "de Wailly" ("De Wailly" at the beginning of a sentence) and not "Wailly". However, the name is generally indexed as "Wailly, Charles de". (An exception is found in Eriksen 1974, however, his example has not been followed by subsequent authors, such as Braham 1980 or Cleary 1998.) During the Revolution de Wailly began to sign his name "Dewailly" (Braham 1972, p. 673 note 7), but this form of the name has not been generally adopted.
  2. ^ Eriksen 1974, p. 274.
  3. ^ Illustrated in Duffy 2005, p. 188.
  4. ^ Braham 1972, p. 673, noting the case of Charles-Louis Clérisseau's debatable position as a working architect.
  5. ^ An elevation of the salone, dated 1773, is in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.
  6. Marc-René de Voyer de Paulmy d'Argenson (1722-1787)
    .
  7. ^ Théâtre de l'Odéon at Structurae

References

  • Braham, Allan (1972). "Charles de Wailly and Early Neo-Classicism", The Burlington Magazine 114 No. 835 (October 1972), pp. 670–685.
  • Braham, Allan (1980). The Architecture of the French Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
    ISBN 9780520067394
    .
  • Cleary, Richard (1998). "Wailly, Charles de" in Turner 1998, vol. 32, pp. 766–769.
  • Duffy, Stephen (2005). The Wallace Collection. London: Scala.
    ISBN 9781857594225
    (paperback).
  • Eriksen, Svend (1974). Early Neo-Classicism in France, translated by Peter Thornton. London: Faber & Faber.
  • Rabreau, D.; Mosser, M. (1979). Charles De Wailly (1730-1798), peintre-architecte dans l'Europe des Lumières. Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites.
  • Réau, Louis (1924). Histoire de l'expansion de l'art français: le monde slave. Listings at WorldCat.
  • Turner, Jane, editor (1998).
    ISBN 9781884446009
    .

External links

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