Émile Gilliéron

Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron[lower-alpha 1] was born on 24 October 1850 in Villeneuve, Switzerland.[2] He attended the Gymnasium in Villeneuve, where his father was the assistant master,[3] then studied at the trade school (Gewerbeschule) in Basel from around 1872 to 1874. He was a student at the Art Academy (Kunstakademie) 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.[2] While Gilliéron worked there, Pils's atelier was employed to decorate sets for the Paris Opera.[3]

By 1877, Gilliéron was established as an artist in Athens.[4] He owned a house at 43 Skoufa Street in the fashionable Kolonaki district, which served as his home and atelier throughout his life.[5] 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.[2] 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.[2]

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.[1] 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.[6] 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.[1]

Gilliéron was hired to assist in the rescue excavation of Psychro Cave in eastern Crete, which took place in 1886 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.[7] In 1889, Gilliéron's watercolours of recent discoveries from the Acropolis, including parts of the sculptures of Heracles and the Hydra, which once formed a pediment of the temple known as the Hekatompedon, were exhibited in Paris as part of the Greek pavilion for the Exposition Universelle, greatly enhancing his profile and reputation.[4] He designed commemorative postage stamps for the first modern Olympic Games, which took place in 1896.[4] From 1899, he taught the artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose paintings drew on the archaeological and mythological themes characteristic of Gilliéron's work.[8] According to de Chirico, Gilliéron's lessons consisted primarily of copying "a lot of prints", possibly those of archaeological finds Gilliéron was engaged in restoring and replicating.[9]

From 1894, Gilliéron established a business, in collaboration with the German metalworking firm WMF of Geislingen an der Steige, manufacturing replicas of archaeological artefacts for sale to museums.[2] A particular area of focus was the production of replicas of metal objects, using electrotyping from moulds made from the originals. Some of his first endeavours with this technique were copies of the Vapheio Cups, discovered by the archaeologist Christos Tsountas in 1888, which Gilliéron produced in 1894 for Salomon Reinach, the curator of the French National Archaeological Museum.[10] By 1903, Gilliéron's company sold 90 different electrotyped artefacts, all manufactured by WMF: this figure rose to 144 by 1911. In 1918, a Gilliéron Vapheio Cup was offered for sale for 75 German Reichsmarks, approximately equivalent to £1500 in 2019,[11][lower-alpha 2] while the most expensive item offered in 1914 was a copy of a bull's-head rhyton from Knossos, priced at 300 Reichsmarks.[12] The accuracy of their moulds was vouched for by the archaeologist Paul Wolters, director from 1908 of the Glyptothek museum in Munich, who wrote the company's catalogue in German, French and English.[13]

Gilliéron's reconstruction of a fresco from Tiryns, reconstructed as showing a man leaping over a bull

In the spring of 1900, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans was excavating the Minoan ruins – which he named the "Palace of Minos" – of the site of Knossos on Crete.[4] Evans wrote in his diary on 23 April [O.S. 10 April] that Gilliéron "began immediately to sort the fresco fragments like jigsaw puzzles" upon his arrival at Knossos.[14][lower-alpha 3] Gilliéron was present on 1 May [O.S. 18 April], while Evans's draughtsman, Yannis Papadakis, was in the process of removing some of the first fresco fragments to be discovered in the so-called "Throne Room" of the palace: Gilliéron recognised the outline of a griffin in some of the fragments, which became an established part of Evans's reconstruction of the room's decoration.[16]

Evans found a number of frescoes requiring complex reconstruction, which he felt to be beyond the skill of Papadakis,[1] and so contracted Gilliéron to assist in their documentation and restoration. Gilliéron and his son Émile, born in 1885 and generally known as "Gilliéron fils", would work for Evans at Knossos for the next three decades.[4] Gilliéron cancelled all of his other commitments to work at Knossos: according to the archaeological historian Joseph MacGillivray, he believed that working there would allow him to "bask in the radiance of Evans's success ... [and] ensure his own "fame and fortune".[17] Evans constructed a gallery above the "Throne Room" to display copies of Gilliéron's work, replacing finds which had been removed for display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.[18] Gilliéron also began, from 1901, to produce and sell replicas of the finds from Knossos.[19] They offered versions reflecting the objects' state on discovery, as well as more extensively restored versions which purported to reproduce the objects as originally manufactured: in the case of objects such as the Harvester Vase from Hagia Triada, this required imaginatively reconstructing pieces of the object which had been lost or destroyed prior to discovery.[20]

From around 1909–1910,[21] Gilliéron gradually introduced his son into his business: the younger Gilliéron worked with his father at Volos in Thessaly and at Knossos in 1910–1912.[2] Gilliéron père was hired between 1910 and 1912 by the German team, led by Georg Karo, continuing Schliemann's excavations at Tiryns: he restored the so-called "Shield Frieze" fresco from over two hundred fragments found in the inner forecourt of the palace. In some of his restorations at Tiryns, such as that of a woman carrying an ivory pyxis, Gilliéron disguised the distinction between original and restored material, creating the illusion that the entire fresco was original when in fact much of it was compiled from parts of other figures in the same scene.[22] The two Gilliérons later worked with Karo on the publication of the finds from Schliemann's 1876 excavations of Grave Circle A at Mycenae, which Karo published between 1930 and 1933.[23]

Over time, Gilliéron transferred an increasing proportion of his work to his son, and re-named his business Gilliéron et fils ('Gilliéron and Son'). Gilliéron fils has been credited with improving the commercial success of their joint studio, and with extending its clientele to include patrons in Cuba and the United States as well as in Europe. Between 1906 and 1933, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased almost seven hundred artworks from the Gilliérons.[21] The Gilliérons also worked on finds from Mycenae. Around 1906, Gilliéron père reproduced several of the objects from Grave Circle A, including the gold mask known as the “Mask of Agamemnon”. Around 1918–1919, the Gilliérons replicated a painted stele discovered at Mycenae in 1893.[18]

The Gilliérons have been accused of facilitating or participating in the creating and distribution of forged antiquities.[24] The archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who visited Crete in 1923–1924, was present at a police raid on a workshop where local Cretan craftsmen produced forgeries of Minoan snake goddess figurines, and wrote that the forgers were working for Gilliéron.[25] The historian Cathy Gere has called Gilliéron "almost certainly an important link in the chain between the forgers and the museums and dealers of Europe and America".[26] While working with the Gilliérons on the Grave Circle A material, Karo came to suspect them of illicit activities.[27] The archaeological historian Kenneth Lapatin has suggested that Gilliéron may have been the pseudonymous "Mr. Jones" from whom the collector Richard Berry Seager reported receiving the "Boston Goddess", a snake goddess figurine generally considered a forgery, in 1914;[28] Gilleron may have offered the same object, or a similar forgery known as the "Baltimore Goddess", to Karo in the same year.[29] Lapatin suggests that a remark of Karo's about "goldsmiths working part-time as forgers" may have been a veiled reference to the Gilliérons.[25]

Gilliéron's recreation of the Minoan fresco known as "Ladies in Blue", Knossos, re-restored after an earthquake by Gilliéron fils in 1927.[18]

MacGillivray has judged that Gilliéron produced "some of the most enduring watercolour reproductions of objects otherwise impossible to imagine because of their poor state of preservation".[1] Lapatin credits them second only to Evans in creating the popular image of Knossos and Minoan society.[30] The Gilliérons' prominent role in the reconstruction and publication of many of the most high-profile archaeological finds of their lifetime has led the archaeological historians Joan Mertens and Lisa Conte to conclude that "their images, in large measure, have defined our visual impressions of the great ancient cultures of the Greek world".[21] In particular, their colourful reconstructions of archaic sculptures, whose painted colours could not at the time be shown by photography, played a major role in the developing interest of the public and of academics such as Gisela Richter and Edward Robinson in ancient polychromy.[31]

Replicas produced by Gilliéron and his son were purchased and displayed widely by European and American museums, as they were considerably cheaper than genuine ancient artefacts. Their work was acquired by London's South Kensington Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, University College Dublin, the Winckelmann Institute of the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, Harvard University, the University of Montpellier in France, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford and the Fitzwilliam Museum of the University of Cambridge.[12] The finds which were disseminated through their reconstructions have been cited as an influence on modernist writers, artists and intellectuals such as James Joyce, Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso.[18]

Gilliéron's reconstructions often changed as his and his employers' assessments of the material evolved: a fresco at Knossos that he originally reconstructed as a young woman, labelled "Ariadne" by Evans after the mythical Cretan princess, became a figure of a male adolescent, described by the British archaeologist J. L. Myres as having "an European and almost classically Greek profile".[32] When the English writer Evelyn Waugh visited Knossos in 1929, he wrote that it was impossible to gain an appreciation of Minoan painting there, since original fragments of fresco were crowded out by modern restorations, and judged that Evans and Gilliéron had "tempered their zeal for reconstruction with a predilection for the covers of Vogue".[33] In 1969, the archaeologist Leonard Robert Palmer wrote a guide-book to the site of Knossos in which he described the "Ladies in Blue" fresco as "a spirited composition ... by M. Gilliéron".[34] Gilliéron may also have invented the scalloped pattern around the edge of the "Bull-Leapers Fresco" from Knossos, for which no ancient evidence has survived.[18] Gilliéron often consciously blurred the distinction between original material and his own restorations, both at Tiryns and at Knossos, where he placed some of his reconstructions directly onto the ancient walls, surrounding the original fragments.[35] In some cases, as with the "Blue Boy" fresco, Gilliéron's reconstruction has been shown to be incorrect: Gilliéron reconstructed the image with a figure of a boy, but further investigation showed that it was originally a monkey.[36]

The "Priest-King Fresco", showing original fragments overlaid onto Gilliéron's reconstructions

Referring to the Gilliérons' practice of combining fragments later evaluated to have come from discrete images, a modern study has concluded that they "created a decorative programme which, as it currently stands, never existed."[37] Gilliéron's reconstruction of the so-called "Priest-King Fresco", which he developed from 1905 onwards,[38] has been particularly challenged: the fresco was reconstructed from fragments which both Evans and Gilliéron initially believed to belong to different figures, and MacGillivray has suggested that their decision to combine them was motivated by "Evans's need for an earthly authority at Knossos".[39] The reconstruction was debated from the time of its publication in the 1920s.[40] Between 1970 and 1990, the physician Jean Coulomb and the archaeologist Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier separately argued that the fragments did indeed belong to separate figures:[41] Coulomb argued that the figure's torso belonged to a boxer,[42] while Niemeier considered that the crown was more likely to belong to a female figure, either a sphinx or a goddess, in line with depictions of similar crowns in other Minoan paintings.[43] It is also uncertain whether the figure's skin was originally coloured red, which would be typical of male figures in Minoan art, or white, which would be more typical of female figures.[41]

Mertens and Conte have written that Gilliéron's significance lay partly in being present at the unearthing of so many major archaeological discoveries, and being able to record their original colours before exposure to light and air damaged them. They also note the size of Gilliéron's professional network and his ability to parlay that into financial opportunities – both of which they describe as "exceptional".[6] On a technical level, they describe Gilliéron's reconstructions from the archaic Acropolis as "tours de force of the watercolourist's art".[31]

In his memoirs, de Chiricio described Gilliéron as "a tall, robust man, with a thick white beard trimmed to a point".[44] Gilliéron married Joséphine Zoecchi in 1884.[45] He died in Athens on 13 October 1924.[2]

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  The "Grandstand Fresco" from Knossos, restored by Gilliéron in 1909.[46]
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  Rhyton in the shape of a bull's head, from Knossos, restored by Gilliéron in 1908[47]
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  The "Blue Boy" fresco from Knossos, erroneously restored by Gilliéron with a boy instead of a monkey[36]
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  Reproduction of the "Shield Frieze" at Tiryns, made by Gilliéron before 1912[48]
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  Part of Gilliéron's restoration of a female figure, carrying a pyxis, from Tiryns[18]
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  The "Bull-Leaping" or "Toreador" fresco from Knossos[49]