Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros
(Moudon 1748 - 1810 Lausanne)
A Capriccio of Roman Architecture with Trajan's Column
c.1785
Watercolour on paper, laid down on canvas
69.2 x 102.5 cm
Bearing the inscription on the verso London, / à Monsieur Fischer a Winsor / Le Forum Romanum Composé / avec les principeaux monuments / de Rome
The artist's engraved AVIS verso (see note 3 below)
Provenance:
Private collection, Italy
Abraham-Louis-Adolphe Ducros grew up in Geneva. He took up his studies at the private academy of Chevalier de Fassin (1728-1811) in 1769. In 1776 he accompanied the engraver Isaac-Jacob La Croix (1751-1810) on a journey to Rome, stopping in Bologna and Florence. He travelled to southern Italy, Sicily and Malta in the employ of a Dutchman, Nicolas Ten Hove, in 1778. Ten Hove had commissioned him to produce a series of landscapes and views of ancient monuments. The preparatory sketches Ducros made on his trip were to provide him with an artistic vocabulary and a range of motifs that later proved invaluable. On his return to Rome he concentrated on the production of picturesque views designed to interest foreign visitors. He published the large-format work Vues de Rome et ses Environs together with the printer Giovanni Volpato (1735-1803) in 1780. In 1793 Ducros was forced to leave Rome under suspicion of sympathizing with the revolutionaries in France. He spent seven years in Naples and a year in Malta before returning to Rome in 1801. He returned to Switzerland in 1807.
In 1784 he embarked on the series of large-scale watercolours which are now seen as his finest artistic achievement - no doubt encouraged by the success of his Roman prints and by the examples set by his contemporaries in Rome - Jakob Philipp Hackert, John 'Warwick' Smith, Carlo Labruzzi and John Robert Cozens. His watercolours were heightened with body colour and touches of varnish to achieve greater effect. The works were framed and glazed for sale.[1] The present watercolour is in extraordinarily fine condition. It is a rare example of a well-preserved work still mounted on its original canvas and stretcher and in its original frame.[2] The artist's engraved conservatorial instructions are still intact on the verso.[3]
Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century artists and collectors regarded Ducros as one of the leading figures in landscape painting in the medium of watercolour. His work was intended to appeal to the taste of collectors who had visited Rome and Naples on the Grand Tour. They were to furnish their houses with topographical renderings of the famous Grand Tour sights. His clients included Catherine the Great, Grand Duke Paul, Sir Richard Colt Hoare of Stourhead, Sir John Acton and Gustaf III. of Sweden. In London his works sold for extraordinarily high prices: at the sale of the Cawdor Collection in June 1800 they made four times the price Lord Cawdor had paid for them on his Grand Tour twenty years earlier.[4] The inscription on the verso of the present watercolour indicates that it too was sold to an English collector.
The watercolour depicts some of the major monuments of ancient Rome but displaced in imaginary order (the term for this combination of real and imaginary features is capriccio). In the background, Ducros portrays the Roman Coliseum, the Pantheon and Trajan's Column surmounted by the colossal statue of Trajan in gilt bronze.[5] A Castor and Pollux group stands at the head of a small lake. The buildings of the Roman Forum - the Basilica of Maxentius, the Curia and the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina[6] - and a section of an aqueduct dominate the watercolour like a 'modern collage made up of heterogeneous parts'.[7] The columns of the Temple of Saturn are glimpsed beneath the slope in the foreground. At the left, a feathery framework of foliage surrounds the figures of five women in antique robes drawing water spouting from the mouth of a stone lion. The recumbent lion itself represents one of two ancient Egyptian lions in black basalt known as the Due Leoni Egizi Capitolini. Originally at the foot of Michelangelo's Campidoglio stairway leading up to the Capitoline Hill, they were engineered to function as fountains in the late sixteenth century. Ducros' imaginary realm of pictorial motifs ignores time and space. While the anachronistic portrayal of antique drapery invites the viewer to step back into antiquity; the ancient monuments are shown in their eighteenth-century state - as Ducros himself would have seen them.
[1] The above is based on the preface to John Jacob, Images of the Grand Tour, exhib. cat., Kenwood, The Iveagh Bequest, 1985; Manchester, The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; and Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 1986, p.7.
[2] This is exceptional. The restorer Olivier Masson notes in his chapter on the conservation of the Ducros watercolours for the Lausanne exhibition in 1986 that they all had to be removed from their damaged canvas backing and mounted on new canvases and stretchers, to say nothing of the extensive restoration required on the watercolours themselves; see Jacob, op. cit., p.43.
[3] Ducros was in the habit of attaching engraved instructions to the back of his watercolours with the intention of protecting them from damage. Fortunately, the set of instructions for the handling of the present watercolour is still preserved.
[4] See Jacob, op. cit., pp. 15 and 25.
[5] This was replaced by a statue of the Apostle Paul in 1587.
[6] The temple was converted to the church of S. Lorenzo in Miranda in the 11th century.
[7] Jürgen Zänker, 'Vedute, Szenografie, Capriccio', in Brigitte Buberl (ed.), Roma Antica: Römische Ruinen in der italienischen Kunst des 18. Jahrhunderts, exhib. cat., Dortmund, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 9.5.-17.7.1994, Munich 1994, p.230.