DUGHET, Gaspard

French landscape painter, draughtsman, and etcher, born of French parents and active in Rome (called also Gaspard Poussin). He is one of the most difficult seventeenth-century artists to identify and define, even though he achieved success in his lifetime and his pictures continued to be in demand for two centuries after his death. He became associated with Nicolas Poussin (whose surname he adopted) at an early age because Poussin married Gaspard's sister, Anne-Marie Dughet, in 1630. It is assumed that Gaspard was taught to paint by his illustrious brother-in-law in the early 1630s, in spite of the fact that Poussin at that time was totally preoccupied with mythological and religious subject-matter, and had not turned his attention to landscapes. It is likely, therefore, as nothing but landscapes survive from Gaspard's hand, that he was the initiator of the classicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. landscape painting. These earliest essays may well be the group of pictures formerly put together as The Silver Birch Master, although there is now a theory that these works represent Poussin's earliest landscapes.

The best-documented works by Gaspard are some landscape frescoes in the Roman church of S. Martino ai Monti, dating from the early 1650s. The superb series of landscapes in gouacheGLOSSARYGouache is opaque watercolour, known also as poster paint and designer's colour. It is thinned with water for applying, with sable- and hog-hair brushes, to white or tinted paper and card and, occasionally, to silk. Honey, starch, or acrylic is sometimes added to retard its quick-drying property. Liquid glue is preferred as a thinner by painters wishing to retain the tonality of colours (which otherwise dry slightly lighter in key) and to prevent thick paint from flaking. Gouache paints have the advantages that they dry out almost immediately to a mat finish and, if required, without visible brush marks. These qualities, with the capacities to be washed thinly or applied in thick impasto and a wide colour range that now includes fluorescent and metallic pigments, make the medium particularly suited to preparatory studies for oil and acrylic paintings. It is the medium that produces the suede finish and crisp lines characteristic of many Indian and Islamic miniatures, and it has been used in Western screen and fan decoration and by modern artists such as Rouault, Klee, Dubuffet, and Morris Graves. in the Colonna GalleryGLOSSARYan upper story, similar to a tribune, running along the side of a building and open on one side to the interior; in a church (basilica) above the side aisles, over the ambulatory (central-plan building) and also over the west end. The gallery was used to keep certain groups of worshippers apart (women, noblemen). in Rome show him at the height of his powers as a decorator. It has always been thought that Gaspard's cold, stylised pictures with intense blues and dark trees are his later works, all painted under the influence of Nicolas Poussin's classical landscapes of about 1650.