Shipwreck

The artist made many sketches of bucolic subjects that he used when preparing imaginary views, whether in oil, gouache, or pastel, which may have been his favorite medium. All his views are animated by colorful, closely observed figures. He became increasingly interested in nature in the late 1750s, when, having settled in England, he sensed the prevailing taste there for landscape, rather than history, painting. In Lisbon in the 1780s he developed a fascination with maritime subjects, ports, and shipwrecks, often painted in pairs. Pillement’s shipwrecks are graphic and dramatic, a form of reportage that even if generalized may have provoked a frisson in an eighteenth-century observer.