Italian Landscape with Fortifications and a Waterfall

Dughet employs a monochrome palette of chalk, exploiting the contrast between deep blacks and delicate whites to model form. The blue-tinted paper adds a cool atmospheric tone, while varied hatching and cross‑hatching create a sense of volume and distance. This chiaroscuro approach, typical of mid‑17th‑century landscape studies, emphasizes the tactile quality of rock and foliage.

The drawing is known from the mid‑1660s, a period when Dughet was producing numerous idealized Italian countryside scenes for collectors. Its provenance prior to the modern era is not fully documented, but it has appeared in several catalogues of his work and is now held in a public collection that specializes in Baroque drawings.

Dughet, often called ‘the French Poussin,’ was celebrated for translating the classical landscape tradition into a more naturalistic idiom. This piece reflects the period’s fascination with ruins as symbols of antiquity and the growing interest in atmospheric effects, aligning it with contemporary works by artists such as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa.