Stop and Look – Beneath the Villa of Maecenas by Abraham Rodolphe Louis Ducros (1787-93)

Abraham Rodolphe Louis Ducros was a Swiss artist specialising in topographical views who became closely involved with English travellers and collectors on the “Grand Tour” of Italy. As a consequence of that connection, he came to play an important part in the development of watercolour painting in England. He was taken up and given substantial commissions by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who had inherited the Wiltshire house and park of Stourhead from his grandfather, Henry Hoare, creator of the spectacular gardens there.  

The young British “milordi” who travelled around Italy in search of classical sites and scenery famous for their associations with Roman history and literature were enthusiastic consumers of works of art that acted as souvenirs of their tours. In that spirit, Colt Hoare commissioned Ducros to paint several large views of places that he had visited, places associated with ancient Roman history but also having splendid natural effects — grottoes, waterfalls, rocks and fine trees — combined with ruined structures that made for highly picturesque compositions. Colt Hoare wanted pictures that would sit well in the spacious interiors of his house at Stourhead, and Ducros developed techniques that enabled him to produce large-scale views that were visible across those large rooms as if they were oil paintings. 

To the traditional medium of watercolour he added opaque pigment — bodycolour, or gouache (a French term derived from an Italian word meaning “mud”) — and worked on several sheets of paper which he stuck down onto canvas and framed grandly like an oil painting. These innovations became hugely important in England when the young J M W Turner visited Stourhead in the 1790s and was inspired to paint his own large-scale watercolour subjects. He did so in a very self-conscious attempt to endow the medium of watercolour with new dignity and importance. So, as Colt Hoare put it, Ducros was responsible for “the advancement from drawing to painting in watercolours”, which was itself an important step in the history of Romantic painting. 

So Ducros possessed the technical means to represent striking subjects such as Beneath the Villa of Maecenas, in which light and shade are dramatically contrasted and the texture of ancient masonry is juxtaposed with cascading water and luxuriantly growing weeds. Like other topographical painters, he would customarily include in his views the figures of admiring tourists, but here he follows the combined romantic and classical implications of the place by making his cast of characters semi-naked nymphs. These the classically-educated Colt Hoare would interpret as presiding “genii” or spirits of the place. 

The ruins that Ducros shows here are in fact the remains of a Roman temple dedicated to Hercules, but in Colt Hoare’s time, they were thought to be the country villa of the famously wealthy and generous statesman and patron of the arts, Gaius Maecenas. An inscription on the back of the canvas calls the scene (in French) “The Interior of the Stables of Meacenas’s Villa”.

Unusually for these watercolours, Beneath the Villa of Maecenas has a composition based on a strongly receding architectural perspective, powerfully lit through a series of openings at the right. The effect is very much like that of a stage set, and it’s clear that in approaching this evocative spot Ducros had in mind the virtuoso etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose large views of Roman ruins and imaginary prison interiors were also enormously popular with the English “milordi” and contributed to the atmosphere of learning and good taste that they aimed to create in their own homes.

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.