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Lot Essay
Born in Lyons, Pillement was one of the most widely travelled artists of his age. He left France for Madrid in 1745 at the age of seventeen and visited Lisbon before spending the 1750s in London. Passing through Paris in 1761, he made rapid visits to Turin, Rome and Milan before turning north again, spending the years 1763-4 in Vienna and 1765-7 in Warsaw as a court painter to King Stanislas Poniatowski. Pillement returned to London, selling seventy of his landscapes at Christie's on 13 April 1774, and revisited Paris in 1778 before going through Avignon to the Iberian peninusla. He was in Portugal in 1780-6, during which period he founded a school of drawing at Oporto, and he may have been in Spain in 1786-9. His last years were spent at Pezenas and Lyons, where he died at the age of eighty in poverty, a victim of the decline of the French rococo taste in the aftermath of the Revolution.
Initially a decorative draughtsman, especially of chinoiseries, Pillement turned to landscape painting while in England in the 1750s in response to local demand. The work which he produced in Portugal in the 1780s, when he also extended his range to include estuary and harbour views, is crucial to the development of Pillement's mature landscape style. That style has often been related to that of Vernet (for example Peter Mitchell in 'Jean Pillement Revalued', Apollo, Jan 1983, p. 49: 'Pillement plays Guardi to Vernet's Canaletto) but in the present pair his debt to other artists is more evident. Particularly notable is that to the 17th century Dutch Italianates, whose influence is prevalent throughout Pillement's oeuvre and is clear here in figures such as the departing muleteer in the Evening, or the milkmaid and cow in Morning. There is of course a shared admiration for Berchem, but it is tempting also to see in this pair the influence of Francesco Zuccarelli, with whom Pillement would have been acquainted in London in the 1750s.
Initially a decorative draughtsman, especially of chinoiseries, Pillement turned to landscape painting while in England in the 1750s in response to local demand. The work which he produced in Portugal in the 1780s, when he also extended his range to include estuary and harbour views, is crucial to the development of Pillement's mature landscape style. That style has often been related to that of Vernet (for example Peter Mitchell in 'Jean Pillement Revalued', Apollo, Jan 1983, p. 49: 'Pillement plays Guardi to Vernet's Canaletto) but in the present pair his debt to other artists is more evident. Particularly notable is that to the 17th century Dutch Italianates, whose influence is prevalent throughout Pillement's oeuvre and is clear here in figures such as the departing muleteer in the Evening, or the milkmaid and cow in Morning. There is of course a shared admiration for Berchem, but it is tempting also to see in this pair the influence of Francesco Zuccarelli, with whom Pillement would have been acquainted in London in the 1750s.