When in 1971 (after starting her career at the Victoria & Albert Museum) Gillian Wilson joined the J. Paul Getty Museum as Curator of European Decorative Arts, it occupied Getty’s extended Ranch House in Malibu. By her retirement in 2003 it had moved twice, in 1974 to Getty’s recreation of the Villa dei Papiri, adjoining the Ranch, and in 1997 to the Getty Center, that monumental Modern acropolis in Brentwood. Over three decades the Getty collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century French decorative art had become one of the greatest in the world, and this was Gillian Wilson’s achievement.

Anna Somers Cocks is an editor and journalist. She was a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, then editor of Apollo magazine. In 1990 she launched The Art Newspaper of which she was editor until 2002 and CEO of its publishers, U. Allemandi & Co. Publishing Ltd until 2018. She was Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund from 1999 to 2012. 

Anna Somers Cocks knew Gillian Wilson well though the latter’s many visits to Europe and also her own visits to the Getty to attend the famous gallery tours.  This talk will be a personal reflection “The only one of your friends who’s not boring”, being the verdict of the speaker’s teen-age son and daughter. This talk will also discuss Gillian Wilson as one of the creators of the Getty Museum, who put together the best collection of French decorative arts in the 20th century, as well as detailing some of  her great acquisitions.