Émile Guillemin Biography

Émile Coriolan Hippolyte Guillemin (1841-1907) was a French sculptor of the Belle Époque. He worked in bronze.  He studied under his father, the painter Auguste Guillemin, and under Jean-Jules Salmson. He exhibited at the Salon of Paris from 1870 to 1899 and, in 1897, received an honourable mention there.  In 2008, his 1884 bronze sculpture Femme Kabyle d'Algerie and Janissaire du Sultan Mahmoud II (Kabyle woman from Algeria and Janissary of Sultan Mahmoud II) sold for $1,202,500 plus auction fees in New York to a private collector through Sotheby's Auction House.

Some versions of his Cavalier Arabe are signed both by him and by Alfred Barye, suggesting a collaboration.

Guillemin made his debut in the Paris Salon of 1870, where he exhibited a pair of Roman Gladiators, Retaire and Mirmillon, drawn from antiquity. Guillemin specialized in figurative works and was greatly inspired by the Middle East and its exoticism. Representations of Indian falconers, Turkish maidens and Japanese courtesans firmly established Guillemin's reputation as an Orientalist sculptor from the mid-1870s.