DUGHET, Gaspard

The picture shows one of the country landscapes painted by Gaspard Dughet on the walls of the Appartamento Estivo on the ground floor of Palazzo Colonna.

Dughet’s careful preparation for the wall paintings in the Appartamento Estivo on the ground floor of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome is documented by precise design drawings that even include details of the staffage.

The powerful Colonna family had lived on the western slope of the Quirinale in Rome since the Middle Ages. Over the years it managed to link together the various houses it had built and purchased over time into a unified ensemble of palaces, courtyards, and gardens. In the seventeenth century, the art-loving cardinal Girolamo I Colonna (1604-1666) began turning the complex into a Baroque residence. Construction began in 1650. The south wing, containing the Grande Galleria, was built between 1661 and 1700 at the behest of the cardinal’s nephew Lorenzo Onofrio (1637-1689).

The modernization of the interiors was begun in the Appartamento Estivo on the ground floor of the palace. The picture shows one of the halls where the walls are decorated with wall-high simulated openings presenting views of either Arcadian, idyllic countryside or stormy and peaceful seascapes. The painted architecture is the work of Giovanni Battista Magno, while the fourteen landscapes are by Gaspard Dughet.

Employing the light colours typical of tempera painting, Dughet, who here followed directly in the footsteps of Paul Bril and Agostino Tassi, managed to give his landscapes, with their imaginatively arranged motifs from the Roman ‘campagna’, an idyllic and cheerful air. Dughet’s careful preparation for the wall paintings is documented by precise design drawings that even include details of the staffage. With their uniform and continuous horizon, these wall paintings, reproduced in the years 1781 and 1813 in complete sets of engravings, are also an important precursor of the landscape panoramas so popular in the later eighteenth century.

Most of Dughet’s landscapes have their origin in the spirit of antiquity and represent the idyllic images of day-dreams that transcend reality. The people in these paintings are reduced to the role of staffage.

The composition of this large-scale painting is carefully designed and resembles the depiction of a dream, without even a trace of resemblance to the Roman countryside. This fantasy world has its origin in the work of Virgil, who recreated the lost paradise in his poetic dreamland of Arcadia, where people live in peace and harmony with nature.

Dughet (called also Gaspard Poussin) tried to combine the styles of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. He clearly differs from his teacher Nicolas Poussin in assigning a sub- ordinate role to the staffage figures.

This composition - an Italianate landscape with a river and rustic buildings, classical figures and travellers in the foreground - 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.

Claude and Poussin represent the two great tendencies in French classical landscape in the seventeenth century, but there were among their contemporaries several painters who enjoyed not unmerited success in this field. The most distinguished of them was Poussin’s brother-in-law, Gaspar Dughet. His formula is a synthesis of the methods of Poussin and Claude. His space composition is less rigidly geometrical than Poussin’s, but more finite than Claude’s; he lacks Claude’s fine perception of light, but is more generous in his treatment of it than Poussin. He conveys vividly the bare and rugged character of the more mountainous country round Rome, which neither Poussin nor Claude seems to have appreciated.

After his death Dughet’s style was widely imitated in Rome till well after 1700.

Gaspard Dughet developed his own interpretation of landscapes animated with figures, a good example being the Landscape with Magdalen Worshipping the Cross.

The highly prolific Gaspard Dughet developed a rugged, powerful approach to landscapes, sometimes drawing on Poussin’s example, for instance in the Landscape with St Jerome and the Lion.

All Dughet’s documented pictures are decorative cycles fore Roman patrons. Neither Claude nor Poussin was able to supply this demand, probably because they were temperamentally unsuited to working on a large scale, although both had tried it. One unifying thread runs through the hundreds of easel paintings at present associated with Dughet: they are all more or less related to Poussin’s own approach to landscape, although none of them is signed, dated or documented. If anything, Dughet is even more dramatic and gloomy than Poussin, a fact that led Ruskin in the nineteenth century to complain of Dughet’s lack of respect for nature.

Not all of Dughet’s work falls into the category of Poussin imitation, however. There is a category of much more naturalistic pictures, which often include views of Tivoli, as in the excellent example in the Wallace Collection, London, and also show a preoccupation with the picturesque. Some of Dughet’s best pictures are of this subject, in which the waterfalls trickling over the rocks are painted with great naturalism.

This landscape combines Roman topography with the picturesque in a manner then particularly admired by English collectors.

Not all of Dughet’s work falls into the category of Poussin imitation. There is a category of much more naturalistic pictures, which have proved almost impossible to date. They often include views of Tivoli, and also show a preoccupation with the picturesque. The ruined circular temple of Tivoli on top of its very steep slope inspired painters interested in nature at its most romantic, and some of Dughet’s best pictures are of this subject, in which the waterfalls trickling over the rocks are painted with great naturalism. A good example of this type of landscape is his painting in the Molinari Pradelli collection in Bologna.