Born in Lyon, Pillement was one of the most widely travelled artists of his age. He left France for Madrid in 1745 at the age of seventeen and visited Lisbon before spending the decade 1750-60 in London. Passing through Paris in 1761, he made rapid visits to Turin, Rome and Milan before turning north again, spending the years 1763-4 in Vienna and 1765-7 in Warsaw as court panter to King Stanislaus III Augustus (for whom see lot 90). Pillement returned to London, selling seventy of his landscapes at Christie's on 13 April 1774, and revisited Paris in 1778 before going through Avignon to the Iberian peninsula. He was in Portugal 1780-6, during which period he founded a school of drawing at Oporto, and may have been in Spain 1786-9. His last years were spent in Pezenas and Lyons, where he died at the age of eighty in poverty, a victim of the decline of French rococo taste in the aftermath of the Revolution.

Initially a decorative draughtsman, especially of chinoiseries, Pillement turned to landscape painting while in England in the 1750s in answer to a local demand. The work which he produced in Portugal in the 1780s, when he also extended his range to include estuary and harbour views, is generally regarded as the peak of his achievement (see, for instance, P. Mitchell, Jean Pillement Revalued, Apollo, Jan. 1983, p.49; D. Wakefield, French Eighteenth-Century Painting, London, 1984, p.161; and Zafran, loc. cit.). Pillement's style has often been related to that of Vernet and, as Peter Mitchell has observed (loc. cit.) in many ways 'Pillement plays Guardi to Vernet's Canaletto'. However the influence of seventeenth century Dutch painting evident throughout Pillement's painted oeuvre is particularly clear in the Tagus views, as Benedict Nicolson observed, loc. cit., describing the present work as an 'exquisite, dream-like picture inspired by the Dutch Romanists'.

A closely related view of the Tagus, apparently dated 1790, was sold at Christie's, New York, 16 January 1992, lot 30