Gaspard Dughet (1615–1675) was born in Rome, the son of a French father and an Italian mother. Although he traveled in Italy, notably to Milan and Florence, he never left the peninsula. Sometimes he is known as Gaspard Poussin after his famous brother-in-law Nicolas Poussin in whose studio he worked between 1631 and 1635. It was Nicolas Poussin who encouraged him to go out of Rome into the immediate countryside and make landscapes. Dughet owned two houses in Rome, and perhaps the landscape around Frascati and Tivoli provided him with the views he sought, for he had houses in both towns. He painted landscapes with a light and fresh naturalism receiving commissions from many ecclesiastical and private patrons, notably the Colonna family, and he also worked for the Borghese late in his career.
This remarkably fresh drawing is one of six in the Crocker Art Museum, all executed in black and white chalk on blue paper. It appeared on the cover of the issue of Master Drawings in which Pierre Rosenberg discussed French drawings in the Crocker Art Museum, while the other Dughet drawings were illustrated but not discussed in the same article.(1) All six appear to have been made more or less at the same time but only two of them connect with the artist's trompe-l'oeil frescoes in the so-called Gaspard Dughet room, located in the summer rooms on the ground floor of the Palazzo Colonna, Rome on which the artist was occupied in 1667-68. The present drawing is clearly connected to Landscape with a Village on the Side of a Mountain, one of the frescoes in the Palazzo Colonna,(2) while another Crocker drawing is connected to Landscape with Two Men Conversing on a Road, also painted at the Palazzo Colonna.(3) Engravings were made in the same sense by J. Cunego and F. Giuntotardi after the frescoes. There is another drawing connected to the Colonna project now in the Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf.(4)
The use of black and white chalk on colored papers seems to be a technique that Dughet adopted in the 1650s and 1660s. Dughet drawings executed in this medium are rare in American collections. Aside from the group of six in the Crocker there is one sheet in the National Gallery of Canada, which is also connected with decorations in the Palazzo Colonna.(5) In European collections the Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, has the finest and largest group including eight drawings, two of which are connected to paintings. There are four sheets in the British Museum, London while Berlin, Budapest, and Hamburg each have one drawing in this technique.(6)
The similarity of Dughet's chalk drawings to the connected paintings is so close that it may be wondered if the drawings were made as modelli for the proposed painting or record drawings after the completed work.(7) The number of unconnected chalk drawings that survive, however, indicates that they are most likely modelli prepared for the patron's approval, rather than record drawings.
Cara Denison, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010
Notes:
(1) Rosenberg 1970 as in Literature above, figs. 1, 2, pl. 22a-b, 23,and 24
(2) Boisclair 1986 monograph in Literature above, cat. 311, fig. 346
(3) Rosenberg 1970 as in Literature above, fig. 22a; Boisclair 1986 monograph as in Literature above, cat. 302, fig. 343
(4) inv. no. FP 4708. Boisclair 1986 monograph as in Literature above, cat. no. 308. fig. 348.
(5) inv. no. 14960; repr. Chiarini 1990 as in Literature above, no. 37; also repr. Couturier 2004 as in Literature above, no. 8
(6) Rosenberg 1970 as in Literature above, p. 32, under no. 5
(7) Patricia Eshagh, writing in Robbin et al. 2004 as in Literature above, mentions the hypothesis that the artist may have made these highly finished drawings afterwards as presentation sheets for potential clients.
Inscriptions: verso, black chalk, lower left: Dughet fec.; verso, graphite, lower left corner: w...we
Marks: verso, lower left corner: Lugt 1008 (Falckeisen & Hubner, Zürich, listed as Füssli in Lugt)
Provenance: Falckeisen & Hubner, Zurich. Edwin Bryant Crocker, by 1871; gift of his widow Margaret to the Museum, 1885
Literature: William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010, no. 33; C. Roxanne Robbin et al., Drawing in Italy from 1550–1650, exh. brochure Sacramento, 2004, no. 12; Marco Chiarini, Gaspard Dughet 1615-1675, Cahiers du dessin français no. 7, 1990, pp. 8,16, no. 32; Marie-Nicole Boisclair, Gaspard Dughet, sa vie et son oeuvre 1615–1675, Paris, 1986, pp. 265, 377, no. 311; Marie-Nicole Boisclair, "Gaspard Dughet, sa conception de nature et les fresques du palais Colonna," in RACAR, vol. XIII, 1986, fig. 4c; Susan J. Bandes, "Gaspard Dughet's Frescoes in the Palazzo Colonna, Rome," in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXIII, 1981, pp. 77-88; Jean K. Wsetin and Robert H. Westin, Transformations of the Roman Baroque, exh. cat. Gainesville, 1981, no. 8; French Drawings from the E. B. Crocker Collection, exh. cat. Long Beach, 1979, no. 12; Master Drawings from the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery at the Church Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, exh. cat. Reno, 1978, no. 5; Marco Chiarini, "Un nouveau dessin apparenté aux gouaches de la galerie Colonna," in Bulletin of the National Gallery of Canada, vol. XXII, 1973, p. 18; Master Drawings from Sacramento, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 1971, pp. 25, 102, no. 61; Pierre Rosenberg, "Twenty French Drawings in Sacramento," in Master Drawings, vol. VIII, no. 1, Spring 1970, p. 32; Marco Chiarini, "Gaspard Dughet, Some Drawings Connected with Paintings," in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXI, 1969, p. 754, note 21; Drawings of the Masters, exh. brochure, Sacramento, 1959, no. 5; Numa S. Trivas, Three Centuries of Landscape Drawing, exh. cat. Sacramento, 1940, pp. 8, 18, no. 51
