Marie-Joseph Peyre

Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730 – 11 August 1785) was a French architect who designed in the neoclassical style.

Biography

He began his training in Paris with Jacques-François Blondel at l'École des Arts, where he met Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni and formed a lifelong friendship with Charles De Wailly. He won the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1751 and was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome from 1753, where he was soon joined by De Wailly, the following year's winner, who brought with him Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux, whose sister Peyre eventually married. Peyre stayed in Rome until early in 1756, during the years when the students at the Academy were creating temporary projects in the new neoclassical manner.

In 1762 he built a villa for Mme Leprêtre de Neubourg in the southwest suburbs of Paris near the Gobelins; demolished in 1909, it is known only through the engravings in his Oeuvres d'architecture and two photographies taken in 1900 by Eugène Atget. It was an exercise in a purely Palladian manner, (Eriksen 1974:212, and pl. 48) quite unlike anything else done in France at that time.