Dughet, Patel, Pérelle

Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin were each born in France; each moved to Rome as a young painter eager to assimilate Italianate pictorial traditions; each spent the rest of his life anchored in Rome, as Claude became Italy’s leading landscape painter, Poussin its leading history painter. During their highly productive professional lives, Claude and Poussin developed  Italianate traditions in landscape and history painting that were to last long after their own lifetimes.

The three artists in this section—Dughet, Patel, and Pérelle—each combined elements of those Italianate landscape traditions in mutually illuminating ways. Gaspard Dughet, whose father was a Frenchman living Rome, and who studied with Nicolas Poussin and became his brother in law, absorbed the Italianate landscape traditions of Claude and Poussin while those two artists were still creating and refining those traditions in Rome. Pierre Patel and Gabrielle Pérelle were artists living in Paris who absorbed Italianate Landscape traditions without having lived in Italy themselves. All three of these artists were strongly drawn to broad, expansive landscapes of the kind that Claude peopled with biblical, mythological, and pastoral subjects, but each often peopled his own landscapes with generic travelling figures of the kind depicted by Nicolas Poussin.