A river landscape at dawn with a fisherman on a boat and a girl carrying firewood conversing with a herdsman surrounded by livestock, a stone bridge and tower beyond; and A rocky landscape at dusk with a herdsman on a path with his livestock conversing with a figure on a mule, a stone bridge and a tower beyond

Born in Lyons, 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 1750s 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 a court painter to King Stanislas Poniatowski. 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 in 1780-6, during which period he founded a school of drawing at Porto, and he may have been in Spain in 1786-9. His last years were spent at Pezenas and Lyons, where he died at the age of eighty in poverty, a victim of the decline of the French rococo taste in the aftermath of the Revolution.

After beginning his career as a draughtsman of decorative motifs, Pillement turned to landscape painting while in England in the 1750s. Later in Portugal in the 1780s, he extended his range to include estuary and harbor views. Pillement's style has often been compared with that of Vernet, while the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painting is also evident. Pillemet produced the present pair of paintings, as his inscription indicates, in 1794 – that is, the 3^rd year of the French Republic. As this was a period of great unrest, Pillement left Lyon in favor of the countryside, where he lived in a house overlooking the Hérault River. Likely inspired by this scenic location, the two compositions represent a single landscape, seen from opposite angles at dawn and dusk. Their crisp handling of paint, bright palettes, and picturesque compositional arrangements, are typical of the works produced in this period, including his celebrated two pairs of views of the Hérault, all signed and dated 1791 or 1792 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier) and another painting, dated 1791, of Shepherds by an old bridge in a private collection (see M. Gordon-Smith, Pillement, Krakow, pp. 259-263).