Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros was one of the most productive watercolourists working in Rome in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Swiss by birth, he arrived in Rome in 1776 and soon gained a reputation for his landscape views in watercolour and oil. He attracted the patronage of foreign tourists, traveling extensively around Italy and, in collaboration with the printmaker Giovanni Volpato, reproduced a number of his works in the form of hand-colored outline etchings.

He was also commissioned by Pope Pius VI to accompany him on a trip to the Pontine Marshes in 1783. Of Ducros's British patrons, the most significant was probably Sir Richard Colt Hoare who commissioned no less than elev...