Émile Gilliéron fils

Edouard Émile Gilliéron (14 July 1885 – 30 September 1939), known as Émile Gilliéron fils to distinguish him from his father, was a Swiss artist who worked largely in the restoration and replication of works of ancient art.

Gilliéron was born in Athens, where his father (known as Émile Gilliéron père) worked as an artist and architectural draughtsman. After studying art in Athens and Paris, he began to work on archaeological sites with his father from his early twenties. He had a long collaboration with the British archaeologist Arthur Evans on the latter's excavations of the Minoan site of Knossos on Crete, and elsewhere worked at Palaikastro and Zakros on Crete under Robert Carr Bosanquet, under Pierre Amandry at Delphi, and for Alan Wace and Georg Karo on finds from Mycenae. His other projects included time in Egypt, where he replicated items of ancient jewellery, and in Thessaloniki to restore Byzantine artworks destroyed by the Great Fire of 1917.

Gilliéron père transferred an increasing amount of his work to his son, and renamed his company to Gilliéron et fils ('Gilliéron and Son') around 1909–1910. Gilliéron fils, whose wife collaborated on the pair's reconstructions, extended the business's clientele outside Europe to Cuba and the United States, improving the commercial fortunes of the company. In 1925, Gilliéron was given the honorary title of "Artistic Director of All the Museums of the Greek Nation". As well as archaeological illustrations and replicas, he designed Greek coins and bank notes. He was also artistic director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where he reorganised the collection of restorations, and he advised several museums outside Greece on the display of their Mycenaean artefacts.

Gilliéron has been credited, along with his father, with a prominent role in creating the popular image of Minoan civilisation, and in furthering the study of ancient Greek sculpture, particularly around the use of colour on statues. They have also been accused of forging antiquities or facilitating the illicit trade in forged and looted artefacts. Gilliéron is sometimes cited as the maker of the Ring of Nestor, a gold ring purportedly of Minoan origin whose authenticity has been debated, and reported to have claimed other ancient artefacts as his own forgeries. The reconstructions of ancient frescoes he created with his father were often highly imaginative, and combined pieces of distinct compositions into single images: modern scholars have questioned how far they represent original Minoan works, as opposed to modern re-imaginings.