Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron (24 October 1850– 13 October 1924), often known as Émile Gilliéron to distinguish him from his son, was a Swiss artist and archaeological draughtsman best known for his reconstructions of Mycenaean and Minoan artefacts from the Bronze Age. From 1877 until his death, he worked with archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann, Arthur Evans and Georg Karo, drawing and restoring ancient objects from sites such as the Acropolis of Athens, Mycenae, Tiryns and Knossos. Well-known discoveries reconstructed by Gilliéron include the "Harvester Vase", the "Priest-King Fresco" and the "Bull-Leaping Fresco".
From 1894, Gilliéron maintained a business producing replicas of archaeological finds, particularly metal vessels, which were sold to museums and collectors across Europe and North America. This enterprise grew particularly successful after Gilliéron introduced his son, also named Émile, into the business around 1909. The Gilliérons' work has been credited as a major influence on the public and academic perception of Greek antiquity, particularly Minoan civilisation, and with disseminating the influence of ancient cultures to modernist writers, artists and intellectuals such as James Joyce, Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso.
Many of Gilliéron's restorations were made from highly fragmentary evidence, and he often made bold, imaginative decisions in reconstructing what he believed to be the original material. In several cases, his hypotheses have been challenged or overturned by more recent study. Gilliéron frequently muddied the distinction between his own restorations and the original material, and was criticised in his day for overshadowing ancient material with his own creations. He was also likely involved in the illegal export of forged antiquities from Greece, and has been accused of direct involvement in the manufacture of faked objects.
Early life and education Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron was born on 24 October 1850 in Villeneuve, Switzerland, the second of four sons of Jean-Victor Gilliéron and Méry Ganty. The Gilliéron family were originally French Protestants from the south-eastern Dauphiné region of France, who fled from religious persecution to Geneva in the eighteenth century. His father, a language professor in the in La Neuveville near Bern, and later in the for girls in Basel, was also a respected amateur geologist and paleontologist. Émile attended the in La Neuveville, then studied at the trade school () in Basel from 1870 to 1872. From 1870 to 1871, he was an apprentice in the lithography studio of Johannes Jakob Tribelhorn at Saint Gall, an experience to which he later attributed the exceptional precision of his drawings of ancient artefacts. In 1872, he moved on to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied with Johann Georg Hiltensperger. He completed his education in 1874–1875 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of the academic painter Isidore Pils. While at the École des Beaux-Arts he also studied ancient art with the archaeologist Léon Heuzey, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and a conservator of antiquities at the Louvre.
Following the death of Pils in 1875, and with the encouragement of Heuzey, Gilliéron accompanied his elder brother, the classicist Alfred Gilliéron, on a voyage to Albania and Greece. The brothers arrived in Athens in the autumn of 1876, and by the following year Émile had established himself in the city as an artist and art teacher. He purchased a house at 43 Skoufa Street in the fashionable Kolonaki district, which served as his home and atelier throughout his life. Among the students to whom he gave lessons in drawing and painting in the 1880s were the sons of George I of Greece, whose patronage gave him access to the upper echelons of Greek society. George's younger son Nicholas enjoyed the lessons and looked back on Gilliéron with fondness, later mentioning Gilliéron in his autobiography; his elder brother, the future king Constantine, later served as the president of the Archaeological Society of Athens. In 1899–1900 Gilliéron taught the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who was born and educated in Greece, and whose paintings drew on the archaeological and mythological themes characteristic of Gilliéron's work. According to de Chirico, his lessons consisted primarily of copying "a lot of prints", possibly those of archaeological finds Gilliéron was engaged in restoring and replicating.
Early archaeological work
Within a few years of his arrival in Athens Gilliéron had already begun to specialize in the work for which he was best known: that of an archaeological draughtsman. Writing after his death in 1924, the archaeologist , director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens, suggested that Gilliéron lacked the artistic creativity needed to make a living purely as a creative artist, and this, together with the economic conditions in Athens at the time, compelled him to turn more and more to archaeological illustration. According to Rodenwaldt, "he devoted the full intensity of his ebullient disposition to this work, although he never fully got over the tragedy of abandoning his original creations". Nevertheless, while commercial archaeological work became the focus of his business, he continued to produce landscapes and other paintings for his private satisfaction, most of which remained in the possession of his family.
Gilliéron's contemporaries and the archaeologists who worked with him praised the accuracy of his draughtsmanship and his ability to reproduce the fine decoration on objects such as vases and gemstones. They also valued his skill as a painter, which he relied upon to restore the appearance of damaged objects and to document the original colouring of ancient sculptures. These skills were in demand, as photography was expensive and the results difficult to guarantee; photography was also generally unable to convey colour, whereas Gilliéron painted in bold watercolour, sometimes at a 1:1 scale. His fees were accordingly high.
Gilliéron's archaeological drawings and paintings began to appear in the publications of the German Archaeological Institute as early as 1879. His close association with the Institute continued throughout his career: among the German archaeologists with whom he collaborated were Wilhelm Dörpfeld, Ernst Fabricius, Adolf Furtwängler, Paul Hartwig, Georg Karo, Gerhard Rodenwaldt, Theodor Wiegand, and Franz Winter. One of his first clients was Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of the sites of Troy, Tiryns and Mycenae, for whom he worked as a painter, draughtsman, and conservator from 1877 until Schliemann's death in 1890. In 1884, Schliemann hired him to produce reconstructions of the frescoes he had unearthed at the Mycenaean citadel of Tiryns in the Argolid; Gilliéron reconstructed one fresco to show a man dancing upon a bull, an image which became famous as the cover illustration of Schliemann's volume publishing the results of his excavations.
In the 1880s, Gilliéron produced a series of drawings and watercolours of vases, sculptures, and other objects discovered on the Acropolis of Athens during the excavations directed by Panagiotis Kavvadias. Many of his reproductions of vase paintings appeared after his death in the publication by the German Archaeological Institute of the ceramic finds from the Acropolis, which used his drawings when photographs alone were inadequate to illustrate the decoration of the vessels. His large-scale watercolours of sculpture, including the architectural sculpture from the Hekatompedon and other Archaic buildings on the Acropolis, and the marble and other works found in the debris associated with the Persian invasion of Athens in the early 5th century BCE, provided an important record of the original colouring of these objects, which was often clearly visible at the time of excavation but deteriorated quickly thereafter. These paintings gained wide exposure outside Greece, as Gilliéron was commissioned to produce additional copies for private collectors and museums. A collection of twenty-six watercolours and tinted photographs, originally made in 1883 and 1886 for the American architect and art critic Russell Sturgis, were later acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they were displayed in 1891 in an exhibition on ancient polychromy organised by Edward Robinson, the museum's curator of classical antiquities. A similar exhibition at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1892 also included watercolours and photographs loaned by Sturgis. After Robinson moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1906, that institution too purchased hundreds of paintings, replicas, and other objects from Gilliéron and his son, including watercolours of the architectural sculpture from the Acropolis. Other copies were acquired by the Humboldt University of Berlin. Some of Gilliéron's watercolours of sculpture from the Acropolis were exhibited in the Greek pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, greatly enhancing his profile and reputation.
In 1886, Gilliéron was hired to assist in the rescue excavation of Psychro Cave in eastern Crete, conducted under the Syllogos of Candia, a local archaeological society. Gilliéron made painted reconstructions of the bronze votive objects deposited in the cave, many of which were in damaged or fragmentary condition. In the same year, he was commissioned by the classical archaeologist Carl Robert to paint ancient sarcophagi for the latter's ("Corpus of Ancient Sarcophagus Reliefs"); he contributed drawings to all four volumes of the corpus, which were published periodically until 1919. From 1888 to 1889, he worked with Paul Wolters at the Theban Kabeirion in Boeotia. Wolters, then the second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute and later a professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and director of the Munich Glyptothek, remained a close friend and supporter for the rest of Gilliéron's life. For a report published in 1893, Gilliéron illustrated the pottery found by Valerios Stais during the excavation of the tumulus of the Athenians at Marathon from 1890 to 1891. Following the discovery of the painted metopes of the Temple of Apollo at Thermon in 1898, he produced a group of preliminary drawings published in 1903, followed by more complete watercolours of the mended fragments published in 1908, which were widely reproduced in handbooks on Greek art. His work as a draughtsman was not confined to antiquities: in 1880, he accompanied Spyridon Lambros to Mount Athos in order to make copies of the frescoes of the Byzantine painter Manuel Panselinos in the church of Protaton at Karyes, and at some point before 1885, he was hired by the Marquess of Bute to copy the poorly preserved Christian frescoes in the Parthenon and the church of the Megali Panagia in Athens, as well as other paintings at Mistra in Laconia.