Louis Ducros (Moudon, 21 July 1748 – Lausanne, 18 February 1810), also known as Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros or Du Cros, as appears on his birth certificate, was a Swiss painter, water-colourist and engraver, and was a main figure in the 'pre-Romantic' movement.
Biography
Early life Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe was one of three sons of Jeanne-Marie Bissat and Jean-Rodolphe Du Cros, a writing and drawing master ("maître d'écriture et de dessin") at Moudon and later Yverdon College. He was born in Moudon (canton of Vaud) and not in Yverdon, as often repeated in error in several sources from the earliest days on, an error, no doubt, attributable to the fact that Du Cros, who grew up in Yverdon as a boy, thus considering himself to be "from Yverdon", attached "d'Yverdun" as a kind of epitheton ornans to his name, as did his friends, and biographers... He was educated at the college of Lausanne, where his parents destined him to go into commerce, to no avail. Du Cros preferred to go to Geneva in 1769, to study for two years in a private academy under Chevalier Nicolas-Henri-Joseph de Fassin, a painter from Liège formed in the Flemish tradition. It is probable that he left for a voyage to Flanders with his master, in 1771, after which he returned to Geneva, where he came into contact with the banker-collector François Tronchin and the naturalist Charles Bonnet. Ducros became friends with the Genevois painter Pierre-Louis De la Rive, with whom, between 1773 and 1776, he copied Dutch and Flemish paintings (by van Ruisdael, Philips Wouwermans, Nicolas Berghem and more) from the Tronchin collection and realised watercolours in the Geneva countryside. Sketching and painting en plein air, he became fascinated by the analysis and recording of natural phenomena.
Italian period
Accompanied by the fellow Vaudois engraver Isaac-Jacob La Croix (CH, b. Payerne, 28 Dec.1751 – d. after 1800), who had worked in the workshop of Christian von Mechel in Basel, he departed for the Italian Peninsula In the summer of 1776 where he established himself in Rome, capital of the Papal States, at the end of that year. In 1778 he found employment as a specialist in topographical landscapes with Nicolas Ten Hove, a Dutch antiquary. That offered him the chance to be employed. In March 1778 by two Dutch noblemen, Willem Carel Dierkens and Willem Hendrik van Nieuwerkerke, to accompany them – later to be joined by Ten Hove and Nathaniel Thornbury – on a four-month voyage (from 10 April to 12 Aug). to Naples and its hinterland, the Mezzogiorno, the islands of Sicily and Malta where he created close to three hundred watercolours (held currently by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in 3 leather bound albums entitled "Voyage en Italie, en Sicile et à Malte – 1778"). The trip took them to the Kingdom of Naples in Southern Italy (Naples, Avellino, Canosa, Bari, Brindisi, Gallipoli, Taranto, Reggio Calabria), and, crossing the Strait of Messina, on a visit to the Kingdom of Sicily (Messina, Taormina, Catania, Syracuse), followed by an embarkation for Malta and Gozo, still parts of the Monastic State of the Knights of St. John at the time, then returning to Sicily (Agrigento, Palermo) and, finally, reaching Naples, their point of departure, by sea.
He stayed in Rome from 1777 to 1793 at different locations in the Campo Marzio, the historic centre of Rome and place to be for artists and antiquarians as well as passing foreigners in the 18th century where he was working as a landscape painter, which was still considered the lesser art form at the time. Since he was unable to take on large religious commissions, which were reserved for Catholic painters, he realised that his salvation lay in passing foreigners, who were fond of picturesque views of the Italian countryside.
In 1780, Ducros is said to have commissioned an etching after one of his marine paintings to Raffaello Sanzio Morghen, a young engraver who had just entered the renowned studio of the highly skilled engraver Giovanni Volpato. A series of eight prints by Morghen after Ducros was later published between 1784 and 1786.
With remarkable judgement, Ducros joined forces with Volpato, who – although also considered a foreigner in the Papal States as he was born in the Venetian Republic –, enjoyed great prestige for his reproduction prints of Raphael's Stanze (a suite of four reception rooms decorated by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino in the first half of the 16th century. for Pope Julius II and later for Pope Leo X, which are located on the 3rd floor of the Apostolic Palace, now part of the Vatican Museums) and benefited from the protection of Pope Pius VI Braschi.
In 1780, this collaboration with Volpato lead to the publication of a first series of twenty-four large-format hand-coloured engravings, in Rome, after his own watercolours depicting "Views of Rome and the Surrounding Countryside" ("Vues de Rome et de ses environs"), such as the watercolour "The Temple of Peace" aka "Ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum" (1779), a version of which is held at the Yale Center for British Art. From 1787 to 1792 Volpato worked on a second series, published in 1792, of 14 interior views of the Museo Pio-Clementino, also in collaboration with Louis Ducros.
In Rome, bustling street scenes featuring contemporaries in local attire became a successful genre in the 2nd half of the 18th century. Popular with tourists on their Grand Tour, they were an important source of income for foreign artists such as Jacques Sablet and Louis Ducros, both natives of the Swiss canton of Vaud. The pair worked briefly together in 1781–1782 to produce plain and coloured etchings. During that period, they published a series of twelve engravings, entitled Scènes et costumes italiens (Italian Scenes and Costumes). The engravings and aquatints, which excel at fine-grained detailing, were drawn by Sablet and engraved by Ducros to imitate wash ("lavis" in French), a technique perfected by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince to create the illusion of an original drawing. In 1782 Ducros also executed a large composition in wash together with Sablet: "Scène d'enterrement dans un cimetière" (Burial scene in a cemetery), in a landscape format, with numerous figures arranged in the manner of low-reliefs.Renouvier, Jules & de Montaiglon, Anatole (1863). Histoire de l'art pendant la révolution, considéré principalement dans les estampes; Ouvrage posthume de Jules Renouvier, suivi d'une étude du même sur J.-B. Greuze, avec une notice biographique et une table de M. Anatole de Montaiglon (via Internet Archive). (in French). [Art history during the revolution, considered mainly in prints; Posthumous work by Jules Renouvier, followed by a study by the same author on J.-B. Greuze, with a biographical note and a table by M. Anatole de Montaiglon]. Paris: Veuve J. Renouard, pp. 147-148 (whole chapter on "Jacob Sablet le jeune, né à Morgy, canton de Berne, en 1751, mort en 1802, élève de Vien")
In 1782, Ducros opened his own workshop on the Strada della Croce, which also served as a very successful place of business for the next decade. He sold his works and engravings made with Volpato, Raffaello Morghen (Volpato's pupil and son-in-law) and his compatriot Jacques Sablet, but also views by competing artists such as Francesco Piranesi and Louis-Jean Desprez. The newspapers began to talk about him and wealthy travellers frequently visited his studio.So, in 1782, he received a commission from the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovitch of Russia for two oil paintings: the Grand Duke Paul and the Grand Duchess Maria at Tivoli and the Grand Duke Paul and his Suite at the Forum (both in Saint-Petersburg, Pavlovsk Palace). And, in 1783, he got a commission from Pope Pius VI, who asked to accompany him to Terracina to choose the viewpointVerdone, Mario (1956). Carriera romana dell'acquarellista Du Cros, (in Italian). [The Roman career of watercolourist Du Cros] in Strenna dei Romanisti, Vol. XVII, 1956, pp. 208-209 (pp. 145-146 in scan) for a painting called Pius VI Visiting the Drainage Works at the Pontine Marshes (now in Peter & Paul Fortress, Saint-Petersburg) and in 1786 Ducros produced another version of the same event : Visit of Pius VI to the Pontine Marshes (now in Palazzo Braschi, Rome). By 1783 he had probably already begun to paint the large-scale watercolours that definitively established his notoriety.
In 1784, Gustav III of Sweden became his largest purchaser. The king's collection, containing a number of wash prints such as "The Sacrifice to Venus" and "The Sacrifice to Love", is still held today at the Drottningholm Palace, where a Museum of Antiquities was built in his honour shortly after the king's demise on 29 March 1792 following an assassination attempt two weeks earlier at a masqueraded ball.
But his primary commissioners were still English noblemen on a Grand Tour of Europe, for example Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Milord Frederick Hervey, the Earl of Bristol, and Lord Breadalbane. In 1786 he had met Sir Richard Colt Hoare, a banker and art collector, who became his most important patron and who bought 13 of his landscapes between 1786 and 1793, which he exhibited in his castle at Stourhead in Wiltshire, where the young Romantic painter William Turner (1775–1851), a protégé of Colt Hoare, could admire them. Colt Hoare is said to have stated that "it is to Ducros that the first knowledge and power of watercolours must be attributed".
These landscapes included: "The Ruins of the Forum of Nerva with the Colonacce" (c. 1786), "The Stables of the Villa Maecenas" "Lake Trasimene, Early Morning", "View of Cività Castellana" , "The Interior of the Colosseum, Rome" , "The Arch of Constantine, Rome" , "The Arch of Titus, Rome", "The Ponte Lucano and the Tomb of the Plautii near Tivoli", "The Falls of Tivoli", "The Falls of the Velino into the Nera near Terni", "The Ruins of Augustus's Bridge over the Nera at Narni", "The River Nera by an Ilex Grove" and "The Valley of the Nera" (all in the National Trust collections at Stourhead, Wiltshire).
Mario Verdone writes that Ducros travelled to Sicily and Malta between 1787 and 1789, but that remains to be seen as other sources place those visits a lot later or a lot sooner depending on which trip he may be referring to [see infra & supra], unless Ducros took still another trip around this time.