Piet de Jong (artist)
Piet Christiaan Leonardus de Jong (1887–1967) was an artist who helped record and rebuild ancient sites around the Mediterranean. He is known for his drawings and watercolors of places like Mycenae, Knossos, Eutresis, Gordion, and the Athenian Agora.
He was born in Leeds, England. His father was Dutch and his mother English. He studied architecture in Leeds and won several prizes. In 1912 he received the Soane Medallion, which funded a study trip to Italy to learn about classical architecture. He designed his first and only building in England in 1913, the First Church of Christ Scientist in Leeds.
World War I interrupted his career, and he served in the army. After the war, he traveled to Greece and began working on archaeological projects. In 1920 he joined the Mycenae excavations as an architect and illustrator, helping to record and reconstruct key areas, including Grave Circle A.
From the early 1920s to the 1950s, de Jong worked on many famous sites. In 1922 he was hired by Sir Arthur Evans to work on Knossos in Crete, where he lived most of the year and helped with major reconstructions, such as the Queen’s Megaron and the Throne Room, and with frescoes like the dolphin painting. In 1923 he became the first official architect for the British School at Athens, and he worked at Sparta, Eutresis, Zygouries, Corinth, and other sites.
During this period he also produced many drawings for publications and supervised reconstructions. He traveled back to Crete almost every year until 1930 and later continued to work on Knossos after 1947 as curator under Sinclair Hood. He kept painting and drawing, creating watercolors of various archaeological finds.
The Second World War forced him to return to Leeds from 1939 to 1947. After the war he returned to Crete and continued his reconstructions and paintings, including work at Pylos in the early 1960s, and in 1966–67 on Minoan fresco reproductions. He died in Crete on 20 April 1967 at the age of 79. His bequest helped extend Knossos’s Stratigraphic Museum.
De Jong used watercolors and gouache for his archaeological art. He was not trained as an archaeologist, so some of his reconstructions reflected artistic interpretation more than strict scientific evidence. He also produced many caricatures, publishing 44 watercolors of archaeologists and others in Athens. His caricatures were donated to fellow archaeologist Sinclair Hood and are kept at the Ashmolean Museum.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:57 (CET).