Heroic Landscape with Figures

Gaspard Dughet (also known as Gaspard Poussin) was an Italian landscape painter influenced by French painting.
He never set foot on French soil, but in Rome there was a French artists' colony to which Dughet's brother-in-law and teacher Nicolas Poussin belonged. Such was Poussin's influence on the young painter that Dughet even assumed his surname.

Most of Dughet's landscapes have their inspiration in antiquity, and represent idyllic images of day-dreams transcending reality, the people in these paintings being mere staffage. This fantasy world harks back to the work of the Roman poet Virgil, who recreated the lost paradise in his poetic dreamland of Arcadia, where people lived in peace and harmony with nature. Dughet's influence on 18th-century English landscape painting was considerable.