François Dominique Barreau de Chefdeville (1725 – 29 June 1765) was a French architect.

Life

From a good middle-class Paris family, Bareau de Chefdeville studied architecture under Germain Boffrand

Germain Boffrand

Germain Boffrand was one of the most gifted French architects of his generation. A pupil of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Germain Boffrand was one of the main creators of the precursor to Rococo called the style Régence, and in his interiors, of the Rococo itself...

 and one first prize in the 1749 Prix de Rome

Prix de Rome

The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...

 for a "temple of peace, isolated, in the style of antique temples". He stayed in Rome from October 1751 to August 1753, at the same time as Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux

Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux

Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux was a pioneering French neoclassical architect.Though he did not gain the Prix de Rome that was the dependable gateway to a prominent French career in architecture, his fellow-student Charles de Wailly invited him to share his prize...

, Pierre-Louis Helin, Marie-Joseph Peyre

Marie-Joseph Peyre

Marie-Joseph Peyre 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 life-long friendship with Charles De Wailly...

 and Charles De Wailly

Charles De Wailly

Charles De Wailly was a French architect and urbanist, and furniture designer, one of the principals in the Neoclassical revival of the Antique. His major work was the Théâtre de l'Odéon for the Comédie-Française...

, and from there visited Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 with the sculptor Augustin Pajou

Augustin Pajou

Augustin Pajou was a French sculptor, born in Paris. At eighteen he won the Prix de Rome, and at thirty exhibited his Pluton tenant Cerbère enchaîné .-Selected works:...

 and the rest of Italy with the painter Silvestre le fils. Returning to Paris, he got to know Ange Laurent Lalive de Jully (1725-1779), announcer of ambassadors and close to Madame de Pompadour

Madame de Pompadour

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, also known as Madame de Pompadour was a member of the French court, and was the official chief mistress of Louis XV from 1745 to her death.-Biography:...

. Pompadour wished to return to forms inspired by the antique and thus to renew the grand style of the reign of Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

, in reaction against rococo

Rococo

Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...

.
Barreau de Chefdeville died prematurely, at 40, and was replaced at the Palais-Bourbon by Antoine Matthieu Le Carpentier and at Bordeaux by Oudot de MacLaurin.