Gaspard Dughet, called Gaspard Poussin

Gaspard Dughet was to become, like Salvator Rosa, one of the most distinguished landscape painters working in Rome during the 17th century. He was patronised by some of the most influential families in Rome, including the Pamphilij and Colonna. Dughet drew on the Roman campagna as the source of inspiration for his arcadian landscapes and many drawings exist by the artist, some of which must have been carried out in situ.

A clear chronology for Dughet's works is almost impossible to define, largely due to the scarcity of dated or documented works (other than frescoes) in his oeuvre, but his earliest landscapes are more densely packed and closer to Poussin in inspiration. Until about 1635 Dughet was apprenticed to his brother-in-law Nicolas Poussin, by whose surname Dughet also came to be known. As his style matured, his rocky landscape settings, which are executed in a style reminiscent of Salvator Rosa, opened up to reveal greater depth in his scenes. This composition, which is framed by trees on the right side, has figures at every plane (in the immediate fore-, middle- and background) and the smoke rising from the building in the distance leads our eye round and past the sweeping plain to the horizon beyond (compare similar characteristics in the Landscape with figures formerly with Galerie Guy de Aldecoa, Paris, datable to the mid-1650s; see M.-N. Boisclair, Gaspar Dughet. Sa vie et son oeuvre (1615-1675), Paris 1986, p. 201, cat. no. 102, reproduced fig. 143). Landscape-painting was a genre in which Dughet excelled and his death in 1675 left the way clear for Jan Frans van Bloemen, called l'Orizzonte (1662-1749), to succeed him as the pre-eminent painter of classical landscapes through the remainder of the 17th and first half of the 18th century.