Four chinoiseries

Jean-Baptiste Pillement was one of the most prolific and sought-after 18^th century painters of decorative, exotic images. His international success started young when after a period of working at the Gobelins he left for Madrid, in 1745, and then went to Portugal where he supervised sets of Rococo Singeries and Chinoiseries painted for Quinta de Alegria, near Cintra, for the house of the Dutch consul in Lisbon, Jan Gildemeester. He travelled to London in 1754, where he remained intermittently until 1762, attracting a number of important clients (including David Garrick), before he left to work across the rest of Europe, including in Vienna for Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, and also for the Prince of Liechtenstein. Pillement was in Poland between 1665 and 1667, providing paintings for King Stanislaw August Poniatowski's Warsaw Castles, and was accordingly granted the title Premier peintre du roi, before returning to France and also going back and forth to England. He became Peintre de la Reine to Queen Marie Antoinette in 1778, providing three paintings (which she deemed 'Charmante') for the Petite Trianon at Versailles, and two years later when he returned to Portugal, he was named Court Painter to Queen Maria I and King Pedro III.

In no small part due to the flourishing of trade with the far east, led by powerful organizations such as The East India Company, the Compagnie français des Indes, the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie and the Svenska Ostindiska Companiet, in the mid to late 18^th century, scenes depicting what were considered “exotic” fantasies became incredibly fashionable. This voracious appetite for chinoiseries was aptly commented upon by James Cawthorn at the time, “quite sick of Rome and Greece We fetch our models from the wise Chinese' and 'o'er our cabinets Confucius nods, Midst porcelain elephants and China gods' (Of Taste, 1756, quoted in H. Honour, Chinoiserie, 1961, p. 125). Though many artists, including Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, produced paintings in this style, Pillement’s inventive designs were circulated by scores of prints after his drawings, and by 1757 chinoiseries had very much became his domain, becoming a lasting source of fame for the artist.

In 1755, Pillement engraved his first series entitled ‘A New Book of Chinese Ornaments’, and between 1770-3, in what was to be a period of great activity, he completed 24 folios of chinoiseries designs and floral projects. These publications provided motifs that he would draw on, with slight variations, in many of his designs. Such was the case with the four panels that constitute the present lot. Pillement here reprises several motifs, including the figure of the man standing on one foot while twirling batons with bells in the third panel, which appears in reverse in the title plate of Pillement’s Suite de Jeu chinois (1770). The man blowing a horn in the second panel, likewise is adapted from his Etudes de different figures chinoises inventees et dessinees par J. Pillement, no. 2, while the woman playing the musical instrument is similarly drawn from one of his engravings.

The popularity of Pillement's chinoiserie motifs was not limited to only England and France, but were also circulated as far away as St. Petersburg. Because his motifs were overly intricate, they were easily transferrable and were adopted both in his lifetime and posthumously in the design of ceramics, silver, tapestries and textiles.