French family of architects. (1) Théodore Labrouste and (2) Henri Labrouste were younger sons of Alexandre Labrouste (1762–1836), a member of the Conseil des Cinq-Cents and the Tribunal during the Revolution and a financial administrator during the Restoration.

Having originally contemplated a career as a painter, Henri Labrouste followed his brother Théodore into architecture, entering the atelier of Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer and Louis-Hippolyte Lebas in Paris in 1818; he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the following year at the age of 18. An outstanding student, he joined his older brother in the première classe in 1820, came second in the competition for the Prix de Rome in 1821 and, despite his youth, won the Grand Prix in 1824. He spent five years studying at the Académie de France in Rome, where his fellow-students included Guillaume-Abel Blouet and Félix-Jacques Duban. All three were influenced by E.-J. Gilbert, whose training as an engineer as well as an architect freed him from reliance on heavy academicism. Together with Duban, Labrouste also formed a close association with LOUIS DUC and Léon Vaudoyer (see VAUDOYER, (2)), and the four of them began to study Classical architecture from a much wider perspective than the academic, ideological tradition, taking into account historical, social and environmental factors that they claimed had influenced its development. This radical approach coincided both with the controversial debate over the use of colour in ancient Greek architecture (see POLYCHROMY, §1, and GREECE, ANCIENT, §II, 1(iii)(c)) and with the discovery of the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia (1828–9).