A rocky coastal landscape with shipwrecked figures in a storm, the masts of the ship beyond

The frequency with which the theme of the shipwreck recurs in Jean-Baptiste Pillement’s oeuvre demonstrates his enduring fascination with the subject. It also indicates his apparent familiarity with the Englishman, Edmund Burke’s enormously influential 1757 thesis on the sublime. Burke promoted among his contemporaries an interest in the power and violence of nature, which he encapsulated in his definition of the sublime as ‘everything which is terrible in some way’. The present work would seem to date from Pillement’s Portuguese period and bears a strong similarity to paintings such as The Tempest. Scene of Shipwreck and Survivors on a Rocky Shore in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Lyon.