Paysage animé

A rocky fall of water breaks the middle of a wooded bank; woodcutters work at the left, washerfolk kneel at the stream’s edge, cattle stand in the shade, and a distant tower closes the view. Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728–1808) signed and dated it 1785, in his last Paris years, and it gathers the whole course of a career spent crossing Europe: trained in Paris, he worked in Lisbon and London before he was thirty, then Madrid, Vienna, Warsaw and Saint Petersburg, painting decorative landscapes for the courts and publishing the chinoiserie ornament designs — made with his wife Marianne — that spread his manner through every craft workshop of the continent. The « paysage animé » of his titles was exactly this: a landscape given life by small figures at their labour, composed as a pendant of rocks and foliage rather than a topographical view, and finished with the light, quick touch that made his work easy to hang and hard to resist. This canvas belongs to the Carnavalet’s holdings of Paris collecting, where his landscapes hung in the townhouses of the last years of the old régime — the taste of the 1780s a decade before it vanished.