Landscape with a Herdsman and Goats

Gaspard Dughet · c. 1635

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

68 × 120.4 cm (26 3/4 × 47 7/16 in.); Framed: 78.8 × 130.9 × 9.6 cm (31 × 51 1/2 × 3 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Painted around 1635, this tranquil scene of a herdsman guiding goats through a sun-dappled landscape captures the quiet grandeur that made Gaspard Dughet one of the most celebrated landscape painters of seventeenth-century Rome. Born in Paris but raised in Italy, Dughet trained under his brother-in-law Nicolas Poussin and developed a style that balanced Poussin's classical geometry with a looser, more atmospheric sensitivity to light and weather. Where Poussin ordered nature into argument, Dughet let it breathe — his skies shift, his foliage rustles, and his pastoral figures exist as natural inhabitants of the scene rather than rhetorical devices. He was so associated with the Poussin name that he adopted it himself and is still sometimes listed in older catalogues as "Gaspard Poussin," a testament to how thoroughly his reputation became entangled with his famous mentor. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this canvas as a prime example of Dughet's mature handling of the Roman Campagna, where light filters through layered greens with a warmth that reads as almost modern. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas using the same medium as the original, with each passage of foliage and sky worked by hand to preserve the luminous depth that makes this painting worth returning to.