The pastoral figures and heavy luxuriant foliage shows Dughet’s move away from naturalism to a highly developed classical style, known as his ‘Poussinesque’ period. This painting relates to Poussin’s mood landscapes, like his Man Frightened by a Snake (1648, National Gallery). Dughet uses the same sombre palate – a hot red earth colour ground clashing with the green grass and heavy slate-blue sky. There is here the suggestion of a narrative in the piping boy and the shepherd hurrying off to the right – an arrangement similar to one of Claude’s favoured subjects, Mercury stealing the herds of Admetus.

Dughet’s landscapes were especially admired for the touch of the paintbrush. Here it is visible in the way in which dry paint is thickly applied, almost dragged, over a coarse weave of canvas, producing frayed edges – a technique derived from Titian. The roughness of the paint paradoxically produces a soft effect on the eye, especially when seen from a distance. Such application favours the rough terrain, the rocks and the waterfalls depicted here. In the eighteenth century this style of landscape (and paint application) was called ‘Picturesque’ and represented a category of landscape distinct from the sublime and the beautiful.

A cloaked figure sits beside a waterfall playing the pan-pipes, whilst another figure sits on a rock higher up the cascade and a third, on the right, runs into dense woodland. The view is controlled by framing trees and rock masses on either side of the composition, which are linked by firm horizontal lines, expressed here in the motif of the waterfall. 

This painting is often associated with another by Dughet in the Royal Collection (RCIN 405318) and although not painted as a pair, the landscapes were treated as such during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in the Blue Velvet Room at Buckingham Palace (RCIN 922144).