Very little is known about Pernet's life. In 1779 he exhibited two bodycolor landscapes lit by lightning at the Salon de la Correspondance. Four years later the artist, aged around 20, was recorded as a student of Demachy. Pernet's last dated watercolor of 1789, is in the British Museum.
Pernet produced very small or very large sheets depicting characteristically fantastic architecture, sometimes adapted from elements of classical monuments such as the Pyramid of Cestius or the Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli