Minneapolis Institute of Art

Armchair

Designer: Charles Percier; Designer: Pierre François Léonard Fontaine; Georges Jacob

Date

c. 1796

Medium

Mahogany (modern upholstery)

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

This chair came from a suite of furniture created for the French royal palace at Fontainebleau, south of Paris. It is based on a pattern by the architects and designers Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, and executed by the master wood-carver and joiner Georges Jacob of Paris. Percier and Fontaine played an important role in the development and spread of the Neoclassical style during the late 1700s. In 1801, they published the first installment of a highly influential pattern book with designs based on archaeological discoveries at the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum near Naples, Italy, which Percier and Fontaine sketched during their travels. The designers borrowed certain elements directly from those newly discovered sources, such as the sphinxes supporting the arms of this chair, as well as from Egyptian antiquity, seen in the sphinxes’ headdresses. France, Europe

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