Jean-Baptiste Pillement

Jean-Baptiste Pillement (Lyon, 24 May 1728 – Lyon, 26 April 1808) was a French painter and designer, known for his exquisite and delicate landscapes, but whose importance lies primarily in the engravings done after his drawings, and their influence in spreading the Rococo style and particularly the taste for chinoiserie throughout Europe.

Life

Pillement had an unusually cosmopolitan career. In 1743, at the age of 15, he moved from Lyon to Paris where he was employed by

.

Pillement then spent eight years in England, fully exploiting the English taste for (Dutch) landscapes. There he was inspired by the paintings of, among others,

. He remained in his native Lyon until his death in 1808.

Works

Pillement's illustrations are a mixture of fantastic birds, flora & fauna, large human figures and chinoiserie. He often worked with printmakers such as Anne Allen, who would become his wife.^[1] His designs were used by several engravers and decorators on porcelain and pottery, but also on textiles, wallpaper and silver. Pillement had discovered in 1764 a new method of printing on silk with fast colours (recorded in his Memoirs). One of his prime vehicles was the single print marketed independently of an album. He published many albums, one is: Νvre de fleurs, ornements, cartouches, figures et sujets chinois (1776).

Collections

• Art Institute of Chicago^[2]
• Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (British Columbia)
• British Museum^[3]
• Cleveland Museum of Art^[4]
• Courtauld Institute of Art (London)
• Getty Museum^[5]
• Honolulu Museum of Art
• Indiana University Art Museum
  (Bloomington, Indiana)
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)^[6]
• Museum der bildenden Künste (Leipzig, Germany)
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.)
• Palazzo Pitti (Florence)
• Gulbenkian Museum
  (Lisbon, Portugal)
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Château du Grand Lucé, France
• National Gallery of Ireland

References

Sources

• Gruber, A. (1992) The History of Decorative Arts, Classicism and the Baroque in Europe, p. 249.
• Gordon-Smith, Maria. (2006) PILLEMENT. (Monograph, edited by Michael Lederer and Joanna Wolanska.)[1]

External links

• Media related to Jean-Baptiste Pillement at Wikimedia Commons
• Bibliothèque numérique de l'INHA - Estampes de Jean Pillement
• Finding Aid for Jean Pillement etchings at the Getty Research Institute