An industrialist, a musician and a composer, a traveller and a collector, Emile Guimet, the only son of Jean Baptiste Guimet and Rosalie Bidault, was probably one of the greatest art collectors of the 19th century and the founder of the eponym museum located in Paris, Le Musée Guimet.
We don't know much about Emile's childhood but we can easily suppose that he had received the typical traditional education of a noble family's heir. His mother being a painter, Emile was probably exposed to various arts. He had formed a particular taste for music.
At 24, he had to succeed his father at the head of the family business, a lucrative venture manufacturing ultramarine blue artificial pigments known as the "Guimet blue". The Fleurieu-Sur-Saone factory near Lyon made the Guimet's fortune and Emile's sharp business accumen took the pigments all over the world. He wisely used the profits generated by the business to finance his social vision and his passion for travelling and collecting.
In 1862, Emile started travelling the world : Spain, Germany, Northern Africa, Eastern and Northern Europe and Egypt. He got fascinated by the Egyptian culture and its religions. Two years after coming back from the land of the pharaons, he published "Egytpian sketches, diary of a tourist". In 1876, he went to Philadelphia to visit the Universal Exhibition and took the opportunity to visit the USA, Japan, China, Ceylan and India. He convinced the government to commission a study about the Far East religions. When he embarked for the USA, he had one idea in mind : creating a museum about the religions upon his return. His idea came to fruition when he was invited to speak at the Anthropology and Prehistorical Archelogy Congress in Stockolm in 1874 and visited the Ethnographic Museum in Copenhagen : he made up his mind and decided to set up his own museum dedicated to the exploration and understanding of the world's religions.
In about 15 years, Emile amassed a colossal collection of cultual statues, antiquities and books. He was convinced an object should be documented and contextualised in order to educate the viewer. When he founded the first Guimet Museum in Lyon in 1879, he said he wanted "to make the objects speak and put them back into their history". He built the museum from scratch and donated a major part of his personal collections : Asian and Egyptian artefacts, greco-latin antiquities, amerindian objects.
The Lyon museum never really picked up so Emile made a deal with the French government and transfered the Guimet Museum to Paris. In 1889, the President Sadi Carnot inaugurated it. Emile took his role as a founder and a funder very seriously. He convinced fellow collectors to donate to the museum. For instance, he got the Varat's collection of Korean antiquities in 1895 and the Bacot's collection of Tibetan paintings in 1912. He also played a major role in commissioning archeological campaigns in Egypt.
The Guimet Museum's collections getting larger, in 1912, Emile decided to donate to the city of Lyon about 3,000 objects and books to be shown at the new Musée d'Histoire Naturelle. He wanted to make it a knowledge and research center. The museum is today known as Le Musée des Confluences.
His passion for his museums did not take him away from his business. In 1887, he became the CEO of Pechiney, a company founded by his father in 1855 and dealing with a new discovered metal, aluminium.If the Guimet museum started with a strong focus on religions, it took an artistic turn in 1920. In 1930, the museum owns the biggest art collection on India and South East Asia. In 1945, the Guimet museum became the Asian Art Museum. All religious objects were transfered to the Louvre museum. In exchange, the Guimet museum got the Louvre's Chinese and Japanese art collections. A few years later, Grandidier donated an important collection of Chinese and Japanese ceramics and established the Guimet museum as one of the most prestigious Asian art museums in the world.
