Among the artists who were most closely associated with Nicolas Poussin (_see_ 39) were his wife's brothers, Giovanni and Gaspard Dughet. The former was loved by Poussin as a son; the latter was also his pupil and adopted his name, though in France he is familiarly known as "Le Guaspre." Gaspard was Poussin's junior by nineteen years, and the older man, recognising his abilities, encouraged him to landscape painting. By the time he was twenty, Gaspard had established himself as an independent painter in Rome, and his works were eagerly sought by lovers of art. The Palazzo Doria and the Palazzo Colonna are especially rich in his works; the picture now before us, by some considered Gaspard's masterpiece, was formerly in the latter palace. Gaspard resided chiefly at Rome, but he also rented houses at Frascati and at Tivoli. In the noble scenery of those places and elsewhere in the country around Rome, he found the subjects for many of his best pictures. He worked so rapidly, we are told, that he would often "finish a picture in a day." He had a genuine love for nature, and also a passion for the chase. "A little ass, that he cared for himself, his only servant, bore his entire apparatus, provisions, and a tent, under which, protected from the sun and wind, he made his landscapes." There is (says Ruskin) more serious feeling in his landscapes, more "perception of the moral truth of nature," and "grander reachings after sympathy" than in those either of Nicolas or of Claude. It is impossible to look at many of his pictures in this Gallery without sharing the sense of grandeur and infinity in nature which inspired them, and hence it is that from Gaspard's own time till now they have enjoyed "a permanent power of address to the human heart." But more than this has been claimed for Gaspard. Critics thought they found in his works faithful adherence to the truths of nature in sky and trees. Ottley, for instance, in his _Catalogue of the National Gallery_ (1826), speaks of Gaspard's "unrivalled correctness of imitation." Against these claims Ruskin took up his fiery parable. Gaspard's pictures are "full," he says, "of the most degraded mannerism;" first and foremost, in his search of a false sublimity, he painted every object in his picture, vegetation and all, of one dull gray and brown; and too many of his landscapes are now one dry, volcanic darkness. And secondly, he had a total want of imagination in seizing the true forms of natural objects, so that some passages of his landscapes are, as we shall see, perfect epitomes of the falseness to nature in the painters of that age[64] (collected from _Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 14; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec.