Alphonse de Gisors

Alphonse-Henri Guy de Gisors (3 September 1796 – 18 August 1866) was a 19th-century French architect, a member of the Gisors family of architects and prominent government administrators responsible for the construction and preservation of many public buildings in Paris.

Early training and career He was born in Paris, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Charles Percier and his uncle Guy de Gisors, who helped him obtain a position with the Bâtiments Civils in 1822. He won second place in the Prix de Rome in 1823 and was promoted to Architecte in 1824.

Southwest of the Petit Luxembourg, in the Luxembourg Garden, he constructed an orangery, which was later remodeled and enlarged to become in 1886 the new home of the Musée du Luxembourg, previously in the east wing of the Luxembourg Palace. In 1840 he rebuilt the street facade of the chapel of the former Convent of the Daughters of Calvary (founded in 1622 by Marie de Médicis), one of the remnants incorporated into the west wing of the Petit Luxembourg.

From 1841 to 1847 he worked on the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

In the 1850s he joined a first-floor suite of rooms in the Luxembourg Palace on the courtyard side of the original corps de logis, creating the highly ornate Salle des Conférences. Inspired by the Galerie d'Apollon of the Louvre, it influenced the nature of subsequent official interiors of the Second Empire, including those of the Palais Garnier. He also restored the arms of France and of the Medici on the fountain and created a 50-metre-long rectangle of water bounded by an alley of plane trees.

In 1864 the extension of the rue de Rennes prompted Gisors to move the Fontaine du Regard (built in 1807 at the intersection of the rue de Vaugirard and the rue du Regard) and to attach it to the back of the Medici Fountain.