It is debatable whether Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin or his brother-in-law, Gaspard Dughet (known to Ruskin as Gaspard Poussin) should be regarded as French. Claude and Nicolas Poussin were both born in France and the latter began his artistic training in his country of origin. Dughet, however, was born in Rome to a French father and Italian mother. Each of the painters established their reputations and lived for the majority of their lives in Rome and their subject matter was the Roman Campagna rather than the French landscape. Ruskin's confession that he had little knowledge of modern French painting is ironically underlined by the fact that the three central 'French' painters attacked in Modern Painters are more closely associated with Italy than with France. Blunt (1953) has observed that, in one sense, Poussin and Claude 'belong not to the French school, but to that of Rome or of the Mediterranean'. However, he also claims that Poussin's classicism is also 'the key to the whole later evolution of French art' (see Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, pp.164-5).