Shepherds in a Landscape (1779): Art, History and Details

Shepherds in a Landscape (1779) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Baptiste Pillement (French, 1728–1808).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The exquisite handling of the pastel, crisp and colorful in the foreground while of the greatest subtlety in the atmospheric distance, bears out Pillement's reputation as the best 18th-century French artist of the pastel landscape. Landscapes in this period were most often picturesque creations, rather than literal transcriptions of nature. In this dramatically irregular countryside, shepherds, flocks, and rustic buildings create an air of idealized rural charm.

Object facts

• Title: Shepherds in a Landscape
• Date: 1779
• Creator attribution: Jean Baptiste Pillement (French, 1728–1808)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel
• Dimensions: Unframed: 46.3 x 60.5 cm (18 1/4 x 23 13/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1973.1

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• “The Year in Review for 1973.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (February 1974): 31–78.
• Talbot, William S. “Some French Landscapes: 1779-1842.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 65, no. 3 (March 1978): 75–91.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.