Jean-Francois Thomas de Thomon

French architect, draughtsman. Born in Paris (1760). Studied at the Paris Academy of Arts. Worked in Poland (early 1790s) and Austria (1794–98). Lived and worked in Russia (from 1799). Academician of architecture and perspective painting (1800), professor of optics and perspective (1802) and architecture (1810). Designed the Stock Exchange and Spit of Vasilyevsky Island in St Petersburg and public buildings and private houses throughout Russia. Fell from the scaffolding of the Bolshoi Theatre and died in St Petersburg (1813). Buried at the Smolensk Cathedral in St Petersburg (1813) and reburied at the St Lazarus Cemetery in the St Alexander Nevsky Monastery (1955).