Shipwreck

Pillement received his training as a painter and decorator in Lyons, at the royal silk manufactory with Daniel Sarrabat (1666–1748), and in Paris at the Gobelins tapestry manufactory. In 1745 he departed for Madrid to begin an itinerant career that would take him from Spain and Portugal to Vienna and Warsaw. He moved to London in 1754 and in 1760 showed four landscapes at the Society of Artists. He visited Italy and exhibited in Paris and elsewhere in France, and he was employed by the king of Poland, the queen of Portugal, and Marie Antoinette. Pillement was the only major eighteenth-century pastelist to specialize in landscapes and marine views, which he painted in both oil and gouache.