A rocky coastal landscape with a shipwreck in a storm and figures on the shore

Born in Lyon, 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 Stanislaw 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 penninusla. 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 Lyon, 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 generally regarded as the peak of his achievement. The present picture would appear to date to the artist’s Portuguese period and can be compared with Shipwrecked Sailors coming Ashore (Madrid, Prado), a work thought to be inspired by the sinking of the San Pedro de Alcántara off the Lisbon coast in February 1786.