M A S T E R  O F  T H E  R O M A N  C A M P A G N A

Probably Dutch, working in Italy in the second half of the 17th c.

Landscape with a Portico

Oil on canvas

96 by 133 cm

The artist is known from a group of paintings certainly produced in Italy, and inspired by the countryside and towns north of Rome, in the second half of the seventeenth century.  Like Glauber,  Gerard de Lairesse, Meyeringh and Roos, he seems to have been particularly inspired by the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin, but developing his staged pastoral settings to a more naturalistic setting. One of these is the valley behind Tivoli with the Temple of the Sibyl (recently sold....): others are of walled hill-towns like Amelia in souhern Umbria, and the broad plain of the Tiber. The similarity of the setting of Gaspard Dughet’s Landscape with an Aqueduct in Berlin is perhaps what prompted the inclusion of another such subject, in a private collection in Venice, listed as by that author in M-N. Boisclair’s monograph on Gaspard Dughet; but it is the command of architectural observation that marks this artist as a quite different hand. The painting in Venice has subject figures illustrating the Flight into Egypt, but more usually, as in the present instance, the staffage is from Italian contadini and animals from the countryside, observed more closely from life than the convention of athletic shepherds with tunics that people both Nicolas and Gaspard’s pastoral worlds.

Another large landscape with a figure subject is the Landscape with St John pointing out the Saviour  that was included in the Gaspard Dughet  show at Colnaghi’s in 1981. The echoes of Gaspard have usually meant that these landscapes have sometimes, in modern times, been attributed to Crescenzio Onofri as the one painter thought to have been a pupil of his: but this does not seem to have a consistent stylistic relationship with those of the latter’s works in the Doria collection.  More likely is the hypothesis that there are the outstanding productions of one of the group of Dutch followers of Poussin, like Glauber and Meyeringh, who were so taken with the few examples of his work that they could see in Roman collections, like that of Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s younger brother, Carlo Antonio. He had seen the majority of the great landscapes produced by Nicolas in the years around the middle of the century, which were then sent to the great and wealthy patrons of Paris and Lyon, but had encouraged his great friend to produce some smaller examples of his distillation of Nature for his own pleasure. These were important for the new generation of Poussinistes because they combined the architectural understanding that was always the backbone of Nicolas’s Italian landscape with the fascination with the Italian scene that is present in the Bamboccianti of the second generation, people like Lingelbach and Helmbreker. The Dutch Poussinistes were quite significant because they immediately preceded the immensely successful formula that another Northern colleague  developed after he arrived in Rome in 1689: this was Jan Frans van Bloemen, called Orizzonte.