Lot 170
  • 170

Jean-Baptiste Pillement

Estimate
150,000 - 200,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Jean-Baptiste Pillement
  • A Mountainous Landscape with Two Foot Bridges and Travelers; and a View of the Tagus, Portugal, with Ships and Boats in a Rough Sea: A Pair
  • both, signed and dated lower left:  Jean Pillement 1790
  • a pair, both oil on canvas

Provenance

Francisco Mendizabal, Argentina, by whom anonymously sold;
New York, Sotheby's, 20 May 1993, lot 124;
With Otto Naumann, Ltd., New York;
From whom acquired by the present owners.

Exhibited

Greenwich, Connecticut, Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, Pleasures of Collecting:  Part I, Renaissance to Impressionist Masterpieces, 21 September 2002 - 5 January 2003;
Greenwich, Connecticut, Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, Old Master Paintings from the Hascoe Collection, 2 April - 29 May 2005, nos. 24 a and 24 b.

Literature

P. Sutton, Pleasures of Collecting:  Part I, Renaissance to Impressionist Masterpieces (exh. cat. Bruce Museum), Greenwich 2002, pp. 34-35, 86-87, reproduced p. 35;
P. Sutton, Old Master Paintings from the Hascoe Collection (exh. cat. Bruce Museum), Greenwich 2005, pp. 56-57, nos. 24 a and 24 b, reproduced.

Catalogue Note

Known at the beginning of his career as a painter of delicate and fanciful chinoiserie decorations, Pillement took up landscape painting in the 1750s after extensive travels to Italy, Spain, Portugal and England.  After a brief return to France -- he was living in Paris in 1761 -- Pillement began travelling again and visited Turin, Rome, Milan, Vienna and Warsaw (where he served as court painter to King Stanislaus III) before settling in Portugal from 1780 until 1786 and founding the drawing academy at Oporto.  After a brief sojourn in Madrid, Pillement returned to his native Lyon at the end of his career, dying in poverty there in 1808.

As was typical for Pillement and his contemporaries, such as Claude-Joseph Vernet, the present work pairs landscape and seascape together in a poetic juxtaposition.  Pillement created many views of the Tagus river basin both while he was in Portugal and from memory after he had moved.  Many of these compositions utilize the same tower, seen on the distant point of land to the left in the present work; compare, for example, The River Tagus at Dawn, dated 1785, which was on the market, London, Christie's, 11 December 1992, lot 38 and the pastel, View of the River Tagus with Fisherfolk, signed and dated 1783, in a private collection (M. Gordon-Smith, Pillement, Cracow 2006, no. 217).  The mountainous landscape is quite fanciful and Pillement must have drawn both upon his travels in Europe and his own invented chinoiseries in conceiving the composition.  An alternate version, with changes to the foreground bridge, figures and rock formations is currently in a private collection (see Jean Pillement e o paisagismo em Portugal no século XVIII, exh. cat., Portugal 1996, pp. 84-85, no. 1).