Landscape with an Angler

Gaspard Dughet was a relative and pupil of Nicolas Poussin, from whom he acquired the concept of landscape as an ideal space created by the artist's imagination. He builds a clear-cut composition using the classical scheme of three planes with side-scenes and staffage. Dughet's preference for depicting human figures went to shepherds, hunters, or, as in this painting, an angler. The personages sitting beside the stream which flows in a shallow gully are normally barely noticeable amidst bushes or in the forest. Dughet's works do not have a subject. They are landscapes in their pure form. The artist was attracted by many different atmospheric phenomena, by changeable weather, by space and man's loneliness in it. His view of the world is that of a man entirely absorbed in nature, merged with it and sensing its slightest manifestation. Dughet's painterly idiom was highly appreciated by English collectors of painting, and therefore many of the artist's works can be found in English collections. Engravings were frequently made of his paintings. When this landscape was still in the Walpole Collection in Houghton Hall, an engraving of it was made as well.