Gaspard Dughet

For most of his life he signed himself, and was billed by collectors, as Gaspard Poussin, though he was born Gaspard Dughet, a Roman by birth. The borrowed surname came from family. In 1630 his sister married the French painter Nicolas Poussin, already the most admired classicist in Rome, and the teenage Gaspard moved into his studio to learn the trade, keeping the name for the rest of his career.

What he learned to paint was the countryside around Rome, the Campagna, with its stone pines, broken aqueducts and sudden storm light. He worked it so steadily that by the middle of the century he and Salvator Rosa were the two landscape names buyers in the city asked for. One of the few groups of his pictures that can be firmly dated covers the walls of the church of San Martino ai Monti: around 1650 he painted sixteen frescoed landscapes there carrying scenes from the lives of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, the figures kept small against the hills.

A century later English travellers on the Grand Tour bought his canvases by the crateful, and the calm, ordered Campagna they show helped shape how English gardens and English painters imagined an ideal landscape. His pictures still turn up catalogued under both names, Dughet and Poussin, a habit that has puzzled sale rooms for three hundred years.