Shipwreck Scene Jean Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808)

Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808) was a very talented landscape painter, well ahead of his time. However, this specialty was overshadowed by his roles as a very famous ornamentalist and decorator during his lifetime. These qualities earned him magnificent commissions in several major European cities, such as London, Vienna, and Lisbon. In Paris, as Painter to Queen Marie-Antoinette, in 1778, he decorated the Petit Trianon with several compositions. His flood scenes and shipwrecks prefigure the Romantic taste and some of his bucolic landscapes announce Corot. As a landscape painter, Pillement is curiously ignored by his contemporaries and critics, yet his paintings have been jealously collected since the 19th century, both in France and abroad. Many of Jean-Baptiste Pillement's landscapes are preserved in the museums of Lyon, his hometown, those of Bordeaux and Caen, and at the Louvre Museum. Among his Shipwrecks, some are preserved at the Uffizi Museum in Florence (pastel, 1785), at the Prado Museum in Madrid (c.1800), at the Museum of Fine Arts in Besançon (1782), and Quimper (1789), at the Philadelpia Museum of Art (pastel, 1782). Our version, of small dimensions, is a late work which is particularly accomplished in the refinement of the details and the rendering of the motifs, it is quite close to a Shipwreck, painted earlier in the artist's career and preserved at the Château de Dieppe museum.

The work is monogrammed and dated at the bottom right: "JBP 1803".

Old frame from the 18th century.