Landscape with Figures

The oval painting is of an unidentifiable religious subject. It probably depicts an episode from the lives of the saints, like its companion Landscape with Meeting of Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the First Hermit. On the left, a man walks behind a dog towards two young people in conversation as they head towards a port town. In the wide expanse of the surrounding landscape are two groups of trees, and in the middle an inlet, with another town visible on the shore. In the background, a mountain rises against an evocative sunset sky.
Dughet’s prolific output and the numerous copies of his work indicate that he was very much aware of the artistic tastes of his time. Following closely in the footsteps of his brother-in-law Nicolas Poussin, Dughet thus became the leading mid-seventeenth-century exponent of the naturalistic landscape. The present canvas, which introduces an original approach to the classical landscape developed by the Carracci brothers, resembles in composition the famous Flight to Egypt in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, which Annibale Carracci painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Landscape with Figures can be dated around 1650, based on its parallels with Landscape in the Roman Campagna in the Musée du Louvre and View of Tivoli in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.