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. and realised watercolours in the Geneva countryside. Sketching and painting
en plein air, he became fascinated by the analysis and recording of natural phenomena. 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. 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. 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 Rome, after his own watercolours depicting "Views of Rome and the Surrounding Countryside" ("V
ues 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. In 1782, Ducros opened his own workshop on the Strada della Croce, And, in 1783, he got a commission from
Pope Pius VI, who asked to accompany him to
Terracina to choose the viewpoint 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. 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). after the earthquake of 1783" (1789) by Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros (1748–1810); Coll. & Loc. unknown Mario Verdone writes that Ducros travelled to Sicily and Malta between 1787 and 1789, forced to abandon his studio and his business and virtually ruined, he took refuge for a few months in mountainous
Abruzzo, painting large watercolours of these still little-visited territories (e.g. surroundings of
Licenza,
Monte Velino, the
Liri valley, the
Roveto valley and
Capistriello). He sold some of his works to the diplomat and geologist
William Hamilton and some
marines (seascapes) to
Lord Acton, Prime Minister of the
Kingdom of Naples at the time, in charge of the reorganisation of the Neapolitan fleet of
Ferdinand IV of
Bourbon, for whom Ducros produced a series of views of the shipyards of
Castellamare di Stabia. Ducros went back to
Malta for a second time in 1800 and 1801, then to
Lausanne, where he started to give private drawing lessons and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the government of the Canton of Vaud to set up an Academy of Painting. In
Geneva, he was named an honorary member of the Society of Arts in 1807. He was even more fortunate in
Bern, where he exhibited his work and where he was supported by Sigmund Wagner, a prominent collector and art dealer. In
Bern, the city authorities appointed Ducros professor of painting at the Academy in September 1809, but he died, of
apoplexy, on 18 February 1810 in
Lausanne, before having been able to assume the post. == Work ==