Gaspard Dughet, also known as Gaspard Poussin, was born in 1615 in Rome. He was the son of a French cook who served one of the prelates, and was brought up in a colony of northerners who had long settled in Rome near the Spanish Steps, a favorite quarter of artists. Dughet’s fate was largely determined by the fact that his father was the brother of Poussin’s wife. It can be considered that Dughet was incredibly lucky: he received an artistic education under the guidance of the great Poussin, who passed on to him his love for the beautiful world of antiquity.

Dughet may not have managed to achieve that deep, intellectual interpretation of ancient culture that amazes us in Poussin’s work, but his perception of the ancient world was original and sincere. It is also known that Poussin taught his pupil to paint landscapes from life, so that already in his youth Dughet knew the environs of Rome very well and appreciated the majestic beauty of the landscapes of the Roman Campagna.

At the age of 20, Dughet was an established master and soon became famous in Rome and beyond. After Poussin’s death, Dughet took his name and began to call himself Gaspard Poussin. The artist did this primarily out of piety, although there were also purely practical considerations. Dughet’s work took place not only in Rome, but also in Milan, Naples, Perugia, and Florence. The artist worked unusually quickly; biographers write that he could paint a picture in one day, so his legacy is very extensive. Dughet’s works adorn almost all major European collections, but there are especially many of them in Rome and in English museums and castles.

Dughet’s landscapes introduce us to a harmonious, slightly mysterious world, full of memories of ancient culture. This is an ideal landscape where we will see beautiful classical buildings, lakes and waterfalls, mountains with castles on their peaks, slender tall trees with curly foliage. Dughet most often sought inspiration by going to Tivoli, Frascati, Ariccio or any other place in the vicinity of Rome, the very names of which bring back to mind the great images of the ancient world. Dughet’s paintings capture the very landscapes that could serve as a source of inspiration for the poets of antiquity, Horace or Virgil.

The world of classical antiquity is a constant theme in Dughet’s landscapes. For him, it was a world that had passed into the past, but – an amazing circumstance – in Dughet’s paintings, the world of antiquity appears before us not in ruins, as in the works of many artists of the 18th century, on the contrary, it is endowed with remarkable tangibility and reality. It is no coincidence that Dughet’s landscapes were so popular with English collectors of the 18th century with their nostalgic craving for the classical past. English aristocrats wanted to see in their estates some semblance of the ideal classical landscape, the landscape of the Roman Campagna. And it was Dughet’s paintings that were one of the sources of motifs and images for the creators of famous English parks. Thus, in the park of the Stonehead estate in Wiltshire, the motifs of one of Dughet’s paintings are directly reproduced, and his canvases are still kept in the estate’s castle.

In the second half of the 1640s, Dughet worked a lot in the fresco technique. He can be considered one of the leading Roman decorative artists of that era. Perhaps the most famous are Dughet’s paintings in the church of San Martino ai Monti, made by him together with the Italian artist P. Testa. The frescoes depict episodes from the history of the Carmelite monastic order. G. Dughet painted landscapes, and P. Testa painted figures.

This method of work is typical of many landscape painters of the 17th century, in whose paintings the staffage was often depicted by other artists. This cycle is important for the evolution of Dughet’s style, since in the frescoes from San Martino the artist found most of the compositional formulas that he would later use in his paintings. In addition, Dughet decorated a number of palaces of the Roman nobility with fresco paintings, for example, the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, in which the artist uses compositions of a narrow horizontal format with a low horizon.

The clear contours characteristic of the frescoes in San Martino ai Monti are softened, the forms become more generalized, the landscapes are filled with light and air. Dughet was a fairly diverse artist. He is not only a master of the classical landscape, colored with nostalgic notes. The French biographer of the artist d’Argenville wrote that Dughet introduced the image of a storm into painting. The Tempest from the London National Gallery can be considered one of such landscapes.

It is possible that Dughet was influenced by the famous Italian artist Salvator Rosa, the creator of the romantic storm landscape. But it is quite possible that the French artist came to such landscapes independently. Sometimes architecture plays a dominant role in Dughet’s paintings. One of the artist’s masterpieces is the painting Waterfalls at Tivoli (London, Wallace Collection), where in the upper part of the composition the clear lines of classical architecture impart to the landscape that mathematically clear, verified harmony that recalls the late landscapes of Poussin.