The exact place and time of birth of Jean-François Thomas de Thomon are unknown. It is assumed that he was born in 1759 in Nancy or in 1760 in Bern. He spent his early years in France, where his father was in military service. Information about Thomon's childhood and youth, as well as his initial education, is scarce and often contradictory. For example, some sources indicate that Thomas de Thomon was born in the French city of Nancy, but it is more likely that his father was transferred there for service after the birth of his son.

From childhood, the boy loved to draw; Thomon's drawings and watercolors give an idea of his first artistic experiments. He studied at the Paris Academy of Architecture, and then, having received the Grand Rome Prize, went to continue his education at the French Academy in Rome.

The fact that Thomon graduated from the Academy is not confirmed by documents. Probably for this reason, I. E. Grabar considered Thomon's architectural education "mysterious." Perhaps at first he worked as a simple draftsman, as indirectly evidenced by corrections of names and dates on projects of the Academy of Architecture discovered by Grabar.

Settling in Rome, Thomon studied architectural monuments of the imperial era, painted perspective views and landscapes in watercolor and oil in the style of French romanticists: Hubert Robert, Nicolas Poussin, and Gaspard Poussin. He befriended French architects working in Italy: Jean-Charles-Alexandre Moreau, Charles Percier, and Pierre Fontaine, nicknamed the "Dioscuri brothers," future creators of the Empire style of Napoleonic France.

Architects of the French school of megalomaniacs had a significant influence on Thomon’s future work: E.-L. Boullée, J. Gondouin, C.-N. Ledoux with their passion for simple geometric volumes. Thomon was especially fascinated by the fantastic etchings depicting Roman ruins by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Thomon's favorite techniques would become the archaic Doric order of temples in Paestum and the round forms of rotundas, cylindrical coffered vaults, and hemispherical domes.

Already in Italy, Thomas de Thomon showed himself as a remarkable master of architectural drawing. The earliest of these is dated 1784. Settling in Italy, he diligently studied architectural monuments of the imperial era and became so attached to their style that he later adhered exclusively to it in his projects and buildings. Living in Rome, he painted perspective views and landscapes in watercolor and oil in the manner of paintings by Hubert Robert and Gaspard Poussin. Thomon traveled extensively throughout Italy, made sketches in travel albums, and painted watercolors of Rome and Venice; he also visited Poland. In Italy, Thomon entered the service of Count d'Artois, who later became the French king under the name Charles. However, he did not receive significant commissions. The aristocracy was preoccupied with brewing political events.

Thomon traveled extensively throughout Italy, made sketches in travel albums, and painted watercolors of Rome and Venice; he also visited Poland. In the early 1790s, Thomon was invited to the estate of the Lubomirski princes in the Polish town of Łańcut. Here, a magnificent palace built in the first half of the 17th century in the Baroque style, the residence of the Lubomirski magnates, has been preserved to this day. Thomon took part in its reconstruction. At the end of 1794, Thomon arrived in Hungary, where he signed a contract with Duke Miklós Esterházy to "supervise and prepare all architectural projects that His Highness wishes to carry out, and to survey the plans of palaces and estates..." In his free time, the architect was allowed to take orders and improve his skills. The first two years of Thomon's service with Esterházy were the most productive. During this time, he created several interesting projects that have survived to this day. The school project—the first known public building project by Thomon—was apparently made for Vienna. As in ancient residential buildings, the compositional center, according to Thomon's idea, was a courtyard of considerable size, around which the classrooms were grouped. In 1795, for the city of Eisenstadt, where the Esterházy residence was located for a long time, Thomon created a project for sulfur baths.

From the Russian ambassador in Vienna, D. M. Golitsyn, Thomas de Thomon could have heard about the grand construction in Saint Petersburg and was probably introduced to the Russian ambassador. Not wishing to return to his homeland due to the French Revolution, the nobleman and royalist Thomon went to Russia at the beginning of 1799.

In 1802, he was enrolled in state service and was entrusted with the reconstruction of the building of the Bolshoi Theatre on Theatre Square. At the same time, he began teaching in the architectural class of the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1810, he was awarded the title of "Professor of Perspective." Soon he gained fame for his pencil and watercolor drawings. Since 1800, he taught at the Imperial Academy of Arts, and from 1811 at the Institute of the Corps of Railway Engineers. In Saint Petersburg, Thomon worked for a little over ten years but left a noticeable mark on the city's architecture.

From 1806 to 1809, Thomon rebuilt the house of Countess A. G. Laval on Admiralty Embankment with granite lions lying at the main entrance. The interiors of the mansion are especially fine: the vestibule with massive Doric columns, the rotunda of the main staircase.

A masterpiece of Alexandrian Classicism architecture is the ensemble of the Exchange building on the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island. More information here: https://reveal.world/story/strelka-vasil-evskogo-ostrova

At the beginning of the 19th century, the most important urban planning ideas were born in Petersburg architecture. "What Giacomo Quarenghi could not cope with in the previous century—the organization of the architectural space of the spit of Vasilyevsky Island—was brilliantly realized twenty years later by Thomas de Thomon. This happened not because Quarenghi was a weaker architect than Thomon (rather the opposite), but because within the limits of Catherine's Classicism of the second half of the 18th century, it was impossible to solve broad spatial tasks. Quarenghi naively (from an urban planning point of view) turned the Exchange building's facade toward the Winter Palace and did not take into account the character of the landscape—the extraordinary width of the Neva at the place where it splits into two branches between the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Winter Palace, and the spit of Vasilyevsky Island... The main square and center of the city in a spatial sense is the river itself and the sky above it, while the gilded spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral and the Winter Palace building are the backdrop, framing this natural square. Quarenghi did not see this; what was needed here was not a modest Palladian villa but a powerful architectural ensemble."

Jean-François Thomas de Thomon brought with him from Paris various projects and drawings of the Royal Academy of Architecture and at first shamelessly passed off others' works as his own. Many architectural historians prefer not to notice this fact, but I. E. Grabar, examining Thomon's engraved projects in his own collection, found corrections of dates and authors' names. For the Exchange building on Vasilyevsky Island, Thomon initially also used a project by Pierre Bernard, which had received the "Grand Prix" of the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris.

However, the power of the Neva landscape was so great that the fact of plagiarism was not of fundamental importance. In five design variants, gradually, step by step, Thomon created a truly original work and, as I. E. Grabar also defined, "surpassed himself." In 1803, after "some nitpicking remarks," the project was recognized by the Council of Professors as "excellent, as great skill was evident."

In the explanation to the last project of the Exchange (1804), the architect wrote that the building is surrounded by "44 Doric columns from Paestum" (10 on the main facades and 14 on the sides). The height of the columns is 11.35 m (the height of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon in Paestum is 9 m, the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis and the Temple of Zeus in Olympia are 10.43 m). However, in the ancient Greek peripteral temple, the colonnade, receding from the walls of the naos, supports the roof. In the Exchange building, a different compositional technique of the colonnade is used, freely encircling the volume of the building and "spreading into the surrounding landscape." The columns are placed so powerfully and widely that in the intercolumniations (the distance between the axes of the columns), not one but two triglyphs of the frieze had to be placed. The innovative technique of encircling the building volume with an external colonnade is known only from one of the projects by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, an outstanding representative of the Parisian school of megalomaniacs.

The spatial scale of the Petersburg composition is enhanced by the rostral columns, modeled after ancient Roman ones but of unprecedented height (31.71 m), and granite descents to the water.

More information here: https://reveal.world/story/rostral-nye-kolonny

The columns were supposed to serve as beacons. The eclecticism of the composition—the combination of the ancient Greek peripteral temple and ancient Roman rostral columns—is imperceptible.

The idea of Russia's maritime power is expressed by allegorical sculptures at the base of the columns. Two male and two female figures, according to a widespread hypothesis, allegorically represent the great rivers of Russia: at the northern column—the Volga and the Dnieper, at the southern—the Neva and the Volkhov. However, this hypothesis arose relatively recently and has no basis; Thomon himself wrote: "the base of each column is decorated with huge figures symbolizing the gods of the sea and commerce." The statues were made based on models by the Flemish sculptor Joseph Camberlain and the Frenchman Jacques Thibault. Camberlain created the male figure at the northern column; the others were made by Thibault. Bronze was initially chosen as the material for the sculptures, but due to the difficulty of processing it, the choice fell on Pudost limestone.

The sculptural groups in the attics, having prototypes in classical Western European, particularly Italian, art, were created by Camberlain. This sculptor, originally from Antwerp, initially worked in Paris and from 1806 in Petersburg, possibly at the invitation of Thomas de Thomon. His works are distinguished by power, expressiveness, and genuine monumentality.

A. D. Zakharov participated in the planning of the spit of Vasilyevsky Island. The ensemble of the Exchange with the rostral columns foreshadowed the style of Russian Empire, which Karl Rossi embodied in Petersburg architecture.

Another masterpiece of the Alexandrian Classicism style, oriented towards monuments of archaic and early ancient Greek classicism, is the mausoleum to Paul I with the inscription on the pediment: "To the Benefactor-Spouse" in Pavlovsk (1807–1809).

More information here: https://reveal.world/story/suprugu-blagodetelyu-ili-mavzolej-pavla-1

The mausoleum, commissioned by the emperor's widow Maria Feodorovna, is stylized as an ancient Greek temple: a four-column Doric prostyle. Massive granite columns without bases are installed on a high podium. A competition was announced for the construction of the mausoleum, in which Andrey Zakharov, Andrey Voronikhin, and Pietro Gonzago participated. The competition was won by J.-F. Thomas de Thomon.

In 1806, Thomon, together with Voronikhin, developed projects for a series of fountains along the road from Saint Petersburg to Tsarskoye Selo (now Pulkovo Highway).

More information here: https://reveal.world/story/fontan-chetyre-sfinksa-ili-chetyre-ved-my

The fountains are characteristic monuments of Alexandrian time architecture. One of them, created according to Thomon's project, was moved in 1946 from Pulkovo Road to the garden near the Kazan Cathedral in Petersburg. Another was moved to the Moscow Victory Park and in 2003 was relocated to Sennaya Square at the beginning of Moscow Prospect.

Since 1804, Thomon, together with A. N. Voronikhin, was listed as a "dessinateur" (draftsman) of the Imperial Porcelain and "Glass" factories in Saint Petersburg. He created numerous drawings of porcelain products, colored glass, glass vases in bronze "mountings" in the original style of Alexandrian Classicism.

No authentic portraits of Thomas de Thomon have survived; literature mentions that during the architect's stay in Vienna, his pastel portrait was painted by the French artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, but the current location of this portrait is unknown. The assumption that the artist painted his portrait is based on her "Memoirs," where in the list of her pastels painted in Vienna, she mentions one portrait painted from Monsieur Thom, the architect. A portrait of a man in a noble uniform of the Perm province with the Order of St. Vladimir (early 1790s), featured in some Soviet publications as an image of Thomas de Thomon, is actually a portrait of Ivan Panayev.

In 1806, Thomon published in the St. Petersburg Academic Printing House a collection of his architectural projects: "Recueil des façades des principaux monuments construits à St.-Pétersbourg par Thomas de Thomon," and in 1809—a "Treatise on Painting" (Traité de peinture, précédé de l’origine des arts), both editions in French. Notably, during his ten years in Russia, Thomas de Thomon did not learn Russian, behaved, according to students' recollections, arrogantly, and even taught at the Academy of Arts with a translator. He was a Catholic, retained French citizenship, and was married to a Frenchwoman, Claire de Thomon. They had no children. In 1813, while inspecting the building of the Saint Petersburg Bolshoi Theatre after a fire, the architect fell from the scaffolding and soon died from his injuries.

More information here: https://reveal.world/story/bol-shoj-teatr-kamennyj-teatr-sankt-peterburga-stoivshij-zhizni-i-zdorov-ya-dvum-velikim-arhitektoram

His wife died in 1846. The architect was given a funeral service in the Catholic Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria on Nevsky Prospect. He was buried at the Smolensk Cemetery in Petersburg. The burial place of the Thomon spouses was forgotten over time. Only in Soviet times did the first custodian and director of the Museum of Urban Sculpture, N. V. Uspensky, discover the tombstone. In 1940, the remains and tombstone of Thomas de Thomon and his wife Claire were transferred to the necropolis of the memorial Lazarevskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

In 2009, in Saint Petersburg, opposite the city exit of the "Spasskaya" metro station, a commemorative sign "To the Architecture of Petersburg" was installed, representing a round medallion on which the names of outstanding city architects, including J.-F. Thomas de Thomon, are engraved, although his name is misspelled as "Detomon."

On June 15, 2011, in Saint Petersburg, in Alexandrovsky Park, a sculptural group "Architects" was installed, depicting the great architects of the Russian Empire who created the appearance of Petersburg.

Among them is a sculpture of J.-F. Thomas de Thomon by the Honored Artist of Russia Alexander Taratynov. Seven years later, in 2018, it was discovered that instead of J.-F. Thomas de Thomon, the sculptor depicted the English chemist Thomas Thomson. The sculptor admitted the mistake and stated that he took the photo from "internet resources."

Sources:

https://funeral-spb.narod.ru/necropols/lazarevskoe/tombs/thomon/thomon.html

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Тома_де_Томон,_Жан-Франсуа

https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%A1%D0%91%D0%95/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD,_%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0