Collection: Empire Style

Empire style is the late Neoclassical decorative idiom developed under Napoleon's First Empire, between approximately 1799 and 1815, with influence extending into the late 1820s. It applied the visual vocabulary of imperial Rome and ancient Egypt to architecture, interiors, furniture, fashion, and ornament across France and the wider Napoleonic territories.

The style was codified by the architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, whose Recueil de décorations intérieures, published in 1812, supplied designers across Europe with a working pattern book. Decorative motifs included Greco-Roman acanthus, palmettes, and laurel wreaths, alongside Egyptian-revival sphinxes and obelisks following Napoleon's 1798 campaign. Napoleon's personal emblems, the eagle, the bee, and the initials N and I, appeared frequently within imperial laurel crowns.

The painted equivalent ran through the late Jacques-Louis David, whose Coronation of Napoleon was completed in 1807, the early Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Antoine-Jean Gros, François Gérard, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, and Jean-Baptiste Isabey. The style influenced American Federal architecture, Russian Imperial design, and the Biedermeier traditions of the German-speaking territories before yielding gradually to Greek Revival and Romantic reactions in the 1830s.