Description / Expertise
A native of Lyon from a family of painters, Jean-Baptiste Pillement was among the most influential decorative draughtsmen in Europe in the second half of the 18th century. He was also one of the most accomplished French eighteenth-century landscape painters. A precocious student, he studied first with the local painter Daniel Sarrabat, before travelling to Paris to complete his artistic training. There he worked briefly as a designer at the Gobelins tapestry factory, before leaving for Spain in 1745 at the age of seventeen. This was to be the first in a long series of travels throughout Europe, which saw Pillement working in Lisbon, London (where he remained for ten years from 1750 to 1760), Turin, Milan, Rome, Vienna and Warsaw.
It was in England that some of Pillement’s ornamental designs were first engraved and published, and where he soon established himself as a fashionable decorative painter. A popular and respected member of artistic society in London, he counted among his patrons the influential connoisseur and actor David Garrick. It was during the 1750’s that the young artist first began to turn his attention to landscape painting. His pastoral scenes, seascapes and picturesque views found an appreciative audience in England, and he worked in this genre while continuing his decorative projects. He returned briefly to Paris in 1761, and then spent some time in Italy before travelling to Vienna, where he worked to develop a method of printing colored designs on textiles.
As an ornamental designer of chinoiseries, flower paintings and arabesques, Pillement created a repertory of designs that were to prove especially popular with tapestry weavers, furniture makers and porcelain manufacturers. In 1767, a collection of his designs was published by Leviez, entitled One hundred and thirty figures and ornaments, and some flowers, in the Chinese style. The remaining seventy prints are of small landscapes and seashore views embellished with figures and ornaments, also Elements, the Four Seasons, the Four Times of Day, and many other agreeable subjects. The success of this project added greatly to Pillement’s popularity, and his designs were to prove a significant influence on the decorative arts in Europe. Married in 1768 and the father of three children, Pillement returned to London in the 1779, the year before the Colnaghi landscape was painted where a sale of 70 of his canvases was held at Christie’s.
Throughout his career, Pillement continued to receive a number of prestigious commissions. Working at the Kaiserhof in Vienna, he executed ten paintings for Prince of Liechtenstein. Appointed court painter to King Stanislas August of Poland, he decorated a room at the Palace in Warsaw with chinoiseries, and worked at the Royal Castle of Ujazdow. In 1776, he exhibited at the Paris Salon but was never a member of the Academy. In 1778, shortly before painting the present landscape. Pillement was made court painter to Marie Antoinette, for whose Petit Trianon he supplied three decorative canvases. Despite the Queen’s enthusiasm for his work, Pillement received little official recognition in France during his lifetime. In the beginning of the 1780’s, Pillement seems to have entered his most fertile and prolific period as a landscape painter. These included both topographical views, such as the famous series of Views of the Gardens at Bemfica (1785, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris) and his more fanciful and picturesque mountain landscapes, such as the present picture. He also achieved considerable success with the marine paintings which he added to his repertoire around this period. For much of the following decade he was in Lisbon, where he founded a school of drawing near Oporto, and it was during this period that some of his finest landscape drawings were produced. His last years were spent in Lyon, where he was employed at the Manufacture de Soie et des Indiennes and gave lessons in decoration and design. He died in poverty in 1808, a victim of the decline of the French rococo taste in the aftermath of the Revolution.
Pillement was, after Claude Joseph Vernet, one of the finest exponents of landscape painting working in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. But whereas Vernet was the official landscape and seascape painter, Pillement’s work was too light-hearted to appeal to the official taste of the Académie. A highly imaginative and independent-minded artist, he shared with Vernet taste for picturesque foregrounds cluttered with fishermen and shepherds, but handled with a lighter touch and with greater variety in the choice of his compositions.
The Colnaghi Mountainous landscape with herdsmen and their flocks beside a waterfall with a gorge traversed by rustic bridge, was painted in 1780, at the beginning of the greatest period of Pillement’s activity as a landscape painter. The flimsy and whimsical compositions associated with his earlier decorative work have been leavened by a more sublime vision, influenced perhaps by the romantic mountainous landscapes of artists such as the Swiss painter, De Loutherbourg, which Pillement would have had the opportunity of studying during his period in England. Here the insubstantial wooden bridges which traverse the gorge, perhaps underline the vanity of man’s attempts to control a nature and the foreground group of shepherds and their animals are dwarfed by the towering rock masse suggesting a moral intention perhaps underlying the picturesque composition. At the same time there is a sweetness and deftness of touch, and an air of fantasy which reveal Pillement’s indebtedness to Boucher and also to Dutch seventeenth-century painters such as Berchem and Pynacker. The composition of the Colnaghi picture is closely to a slightly smaller painting Le Pont rustique appuyé sur des rochers (oil on canvas, 40,5 x 59 cm), dated “L’an 3 D la R” (1795), located in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, painted more than a decade later. There are also two landscapes in pastel showing similar rustic bridges in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Lyon, dated 1795 which appear to have been inspired by the Colnaghi landscape as well as a related mountainous landscape in oil dated 1790, which was exhibited in the 1997 exhibition, Jean Pillement and Landscape painting in Portugal . The Colnaghi landscape is the grandest in scale, most romantic in mood and earliest in date of all these mountainous landscapes.
Fantasy is, of course, the essence of the Colnaghi landscape. Nature is approached in a romantic and ideal vein and the brutal truths of nature and peasant life in the ancien régime are transformed in a poetic world of harmony where, despite the sublime elements such as the rushing waterfall, the towering rocks and the precarious bridges spanning the gorge, the landscape seems to be enveloped in a haze of contentment and the overall tone remains agreeable and light-hearted.
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