Jean Pillement

Jean-Baptiste Pillement, known as Jean Pillement, born on 24 May 1728 in Lyon, where he died on 26 April 1808, was a French painter and aquafortist. He was one of the great exponents of the Rococo movement throughout Europe, painting for the King of Poland and Queen Marie-Antoinette. A keen traveller, he lived between Warsaw, London, Lisbon and Paris.

Pillement moved to Paris to finish his studies and studied with Daniel Sarrabat. He then joined the Gobelins factory as a drawer. In 1745, at the age of seventeen, he left for Spain and Portugal as a decorative painter. In Portugal, he was offered the honorary title of "king's painter", which he refused. He also went to Vienna and worked for the Prince of Liechtenstein, who bought ten works of arts from him. One of his landscapes, Le Retour au Hameau, was engraved in Vienna by François Godefroy and printed in Paris in 1777.

Pillement was a great decorator, and his work is a precious document of the evolution of artistic representations and the use of motifs throughout the 18th century. Pillement's stylistic development cannot be reduced to rocco.