JEAN BAPTISTE PILLEMENT (1728-1808)

A PAIR OF PASTORAL SCENES
Bears inscription to stretcher 'The property of Celeste Cinatti Batalha Reis / Southerland Hotel, Southampton. / or Portuguese consulate. / or 'Crofton' Twyford, Hants. / or c/o Martin & Roberts Esq., / Boivers Farm, / Platform. Hants'
Pastels on paper laid to canvas
Both 63.5 x 96.5 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Acquired in the 1830s or 1840s by Jose Guiseppe Cinatti (1808-1879) for his wife Maria Anastasia Rivolta Cinatti, Lisbon, and by descent to their daughter, Celestine Batalha Reis (1848-1900) married to Jayme Batalha Reis (1847-1935), Lisbon, and London, and then by descent to their daughters Céleste and Béatrice, thence by descent
 
 
 
 
 
Jean-Baptiste Pillement came from a family of decorative artists, with his father Paul and uncle Philippe both employed internationally (his father in St Petersburg and the pair of them in Lisbon), and another relative (Antoine) recorded as Peintre ordinaire du Roi, Ponte Notre-Dame). Jean-Baptiste;s initial studies were in his hometown, under the history painter Daniel Sarrabat II, but his prodigious talent was recognised as early as 1743, when he was employed as a draughtsman by the Gobelins tapestry factory in Paris. Two years after this, at just sixteen, Pillement embarked on the first of his many journeys abroad: he spent three years in Madrid in the late 1740’s, before moving to Lisbon in 1750, where he was offered both a pension and title of Peintre du Roi for the King and Queen of Portugal, a title he turned down. Several years later, Pillement moved again, this time to London, where he discovered a collecting class that was particularly fond of precisely the sort of landscapes that he specialised in. 
 
During his six years in England, Pillement established a reputation that spread throughout Europe, thanks in large part to the distribution of prints after his drawings of chinoisserie designs. These captured the imagination of collectors across the continent, with Pillement playing a pivotal role in the development of the Rococo taste for these elaborate, delicate depictions of fantastic flora and fauna, fantastical suspended edifices and ornate architectural devices. His designs were transferred to porcelain, pottery, textiles and silverware, and his influence in this regard continues to be felt in decorative design down to the present day. 
 
Pillement was a prodigious traveller, and never more so than between 1670-67, when he could be found in Lyon, Paris, Turin, Milan, Rome, Vienna and Warsaw. The Emperor of Austria invited the artist to Vienna to create an extensive decorative scheme of pastel drawings of pastoral scenes in vibrant, monochrome blue (applied directly onto canvas and set into panels) for their summer palace which were received with great acclaim. 
 
Before they could commission further works, Pillement was whisked off to Warsaw by the King of Poland for two years. 1772 and the following year saw him in London, where he exhibited more than 30 works (including six at the Society of Artists). One of his most enthusiastic patrons in England was the celebrated actor, David Garrick, who owned several dozens of his pastels, oils and drawings. Further trips to Portugal and Spain in the subsequent decade yielded some of his finest works, many of which remain in distinguished collections in those countries.
 
 
 
Pastels comprise a relatively small part of Pillement’s prolific oeuvre, and he worked deftly across oil, gouache, pastel, chalks and ink (with hundreds of engravings after his designs further propagating his reputation of course). His pastels are, like his oils, almost saturated in their colouring, with deep blues which have come to dominate many of these as the green has receded: Neil Jeffares has noted that ‘green pastel was frequently a compound of a stable blue and a yellow lake which fades with exposure to light’ (our emphasis). The present pair are all the more remarkable for having retained so much of their greens, and the sum of the colouring in them shows Pillement’s remarkable skill at creating a complimentary whole in this manner.
 
 
This pair are something of an anomaly within the artist's extensive oeuvre: the majority of Pillement's pastels and paintings on this scale depict broad, sweeping vistas, with the staffage more diminutive within the composition than in the present examples. There are a handful of works that are comparable in this regard (including a pair in the Musée des Beax-Arts d'Orleans, acc. nos. 1205 & 6), but none that are so ambitious.