Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron (1850–1924),ÉmileGillié 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 artifacts 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 career
Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron was born on 24 October 1850 in Villeneuve, Switzerland. He attended the in Villeneuve, where his father was the assistant master, then studied at the trade school () in Basel from around 1872 to 1874. He was a student at the Art Academy () in Munich from 1875 to 1876, and finally at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from around 1875 to 1876, where he was a student of the academic painter Isidore Pils. While Gilliéron worked there, Pils's atelier was employed to decorate sets for the Paris Opera.
By 1877, Gilliéron was established as an artist in Athens. He owned a house at 43 Skoufa Street in the fashionable Kolonaki district, which served as his home and atelier throughout his life. He quickly gained a reputation as an archaeological draughtsman, and was employed by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens as well as Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of the sites of Troy, Tiryns and Mycenae, who employed Gilliéron as a painter, draughtsman and conservator until his death in 1890. In the 1880s, Gilliéron was employed by the Greek royal family of George I to provide drawing lessons to their young sons: this gave him access to the upper echelons of Greek society, including the opportunity to collaborate with the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society dedicated to the excavation, restoration and study of ancient remains.
Gilliéron's 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. His fees were accordingly high. In the spring of 1883, he was hired by the architect and art critic Russell Sturgis to make photographs and watercolours of the sculptures recently unearthed by Panagiotis Kavvadias from the Acropolis of Athens, twenty-six of which were sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 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 frontispiece of Schliemann's volume publishing the results of his excavations.