Jean-Baptiste Lepère (December 1, 1761 – July 16, 1844) was a French architect, father-in-law of the architect Jacques Hittorff. He was the designer of the

Palace of Fontainebleau Palace of Fontainebleau ( , ; ), located southeast of the center of Paris, in the commune of Fontainebleau, is one of the largest French royal châteaux. It served as a hunting lodge and summer residence for many of the List of French monarchs ...

and the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Paris, largely revised by Hittorf during its protracted execution, and one of the architects who worked on raising the colonne Vendôme. Lepère was one of the many members of the ''Commission des Sciences et des Arts'' taken by Bonaparte on his Egyptian Expedition. While there, Lepère also produced drawings of

ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

ian temples and other remains. Other members of this commission were Jacques-Marie Le Père (1763–1841) and his brother Gratien Le Père (1769–1826), engineers and surveyors, who were to see whether Napoleon's planned project of linking the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

with the

Red Sea The Red Sea is a sea inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. Its connection to the ocean is in the south, through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. To its north lie the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and th ...

across the

Nile delta The Nile Delta (, or simply , ) is the River delta, delta formed in Lower Egypt where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's larger deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Port Said in the eas ...

could be realised and if the difference in sea level between the two was sufficiently small to make such a canal possible.

References

1761 births 1844 deaths Architects from Paris 18th-century French architects 19th-century French architects French Egyptologists Commission des Sciences et des Arts members {{Egyptologist-stub