Alban Emmanuel Guillaume-Rey

Alban Emmanuel Guillaume-Rey, usually called Emmanuel-Guillaume Rey, gave the Louvre about forty antiquities from Idalion, Kition and Amathus, a gift now known as the fonds Guillaume-Rey². He was born at Chaumont on 28 May 1837 and died at Chartres on 4 April 1916^9,10. A. Caubet gives his civil name as Alban Guillaume, "self-called Guillaume-Rey"⁴. The compound name is explained by his parentage: his father was François-Victor Guillaume and his mother a Rey¹⁰.

Rey was a historian and topographer of the Crusader states and was sent to the Near East on state missions from 1857. His first mission, in 1857-58, took him through the Haouran and to the Dead Sea¹⁰. In Cyprus in 1857 he met Sosthène Grasset^1,2.

In August 1859 he left Paris on a ministerial mission to Syria with the young photographer Louis de Clercq. The stop in Cyprus produced what are known as the first photographs of the island⁸.

The Louvre gifts

Early in 1860 Rey acquired in Cyprus a male statue 1.55 m high, called the "Roi de Chypre" or "Kinyras", and gave it to the Louvre⁶. Caubet lists among his gifts the base of a statue with a Phoenician dedication to Melqart, now Louvre AO 4826⁴. Some of his antiquities went to Châteaudun instead of Paris⁴.

In 1870 Vogüé told Charles Clermont-Ganneau that the Louvre's Cypriot collection had cost under 1,000 francs, thanks to gifts from himself, Rey, William Waddington and the duc de Luynes².

Grasset and the Vogüé mission

In May 1860 Rey presented Grasset to Hortense Cornu in Paris⁷. She went on to press Napoleon III toward a Phoenician mission⁷.

When Melchior de Vogüé went to Cyprus in 1862, Rey wrote to him on 9 February with maps of the island and sketches of the Famagusta fortifications. He recommended Grasset as "un garçon intelligent" and pointed Vogüé to the Amathus vase, the Soli inscription and Athienou². The letter arrived after Vogüé had spent 2 to 8 February at Famagusta, and Edmond Duthoit was to do the drawing instead^2,3. Bonato says Rey had barely started on the Famagusta defences and never had the chance to resume them².

A Phoenician inscription of Rey's had been left at the French consulate in Larnaca, and he authorised Vogüé's party to remove it¹. The same year Grasset offered him co-ownership of the Athienou statue and complained that Rey owed him "cinq à six réponses"².

Later years

Rey's Étude sur les monuments de l'architecture militaire des croisés en Syrie et dans l'île de Chypre appeared from the Imprimerie nationale in 1871¹⁴. According to the French Wikipedia article, he gave medals to the museum at Chartres in 1865, received the Légion d'honneur in 1866, commanded the mobiles of Eure-et-Loir in 1870 and bought the château de Lauresse in 1877¹⁰.