Dughet played an important role as mediator between the chief representatives of landscape painting in the seventeenth century - Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa - and their followers up into the nineteenth century. He was given his first training from his brother-in-law, Nicolas Poussin, whose concept of landscape painting initially wholly dominated his work. But after leaving Poussin's workshop, he increasingly took inspiration from the two others, Lorrain and Rosa, who were active in Rome in the late 1630s. In his generally small-format pictures Dughet began to combine the various artistic concepts of the heroic, dramatic and ideal landscape by composing natural forms from all three genres into new, self-contained landscape details. His sense for decorative relationships also served him as a fresco painter. His method, as well as an occasional superficiality owing to his large painting output, helped to influence the subsequent generation of painters. For their part, they borrowed from the same stock of motifs and placed these, with no compelling logic, in mostly only decorative contexts, as was characteristic of landscape painting in the eighteenth century. Prints after his works played an important role in this. The great number of undated paintings and drawings and the frequent repetition of individual motifs make it difficult to construct a chronology of Dughet's works.
