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The Swiss painter Louis Ducros traveled to Rome in 1776 and remained in Italy until 1807. there he became known for his large, elaborately worked watercolors of Italian scenes, frequently featuring ancient ruins, which were much sought after by British visitors to Italy. One of the most important of his British patrons was the antiquary Richard Colt Hoare, who wrote in 1787 that four drawings that Ducros had done for him "will be the admiration of the whole town & put all our English artists, even the great Mr. Smith [John 'Warwick' Smith] to the blush." In 1822 Colt Hoare, who eventually owned thirteen watercolors by Ducros, credited the artist with a key role in the development of watercolor painting in Britain:
The advancement from drawing to
painting in water-colours did not
take place til after the introduction
into England of hte drawings of
Louis du Cros, a Swiss artist who
settled at Rome. His works proved
the force as well as the consequence
that could be given to the unsubs-
tantial body of water-colours, and
to him I attribute the first knowledge
and power if watercolours. Hence
have sprung a numerous succession
of Artists in this line.
Colt Hoare's partiality toward Ducros led him to overestimate the Swiss artists influence on British watercolorists; there is no evidence that the achievements in watercolor by "Warwick" Smith (cat. 74), John Robert Cozens (cats. 103-4 and 142), and other British artists working in Italy were based on a knowledge of Ducros' work. Colt Hoare was, however, an important early patron of J.M.W. Turner (cat. 144), and it is very probably that Turner's large dramatic landscape watercolors of the early years of the nineteenth century reflect his awareness of the Ducros watercolors he would have seen in Colts Hoare's collection.

Scott Wilcox

Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 123 cat. no. 102