College with Yverdon, private academy of drawing in Geneva since 1769, voyage in Flandres, then departure for Rome in 1776. Four months tour in the south of Italy, in Sicily and in Malta in 1778 to accompany by the Dutch gentlemen (300 watercolours of Ducros to Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam).

Ducros opens a workshop in Rome (1779), it specializes in the landscape with the watercolour and joins the Italian engraver Giovanni Volpato to produce and diffuse picturesque sights of Rome and its surroundings engraved with the etchings and colored with the hand. He works for the pope Pie VI and sells his landscapes to the rich tourists of passage to Rome (today in the castles and the museums in Sweden, England and Russia).

Suspected of Jacobinism, it is driven out of Rome in 1793 and takes refuge in the Abruzzi where it paints the first known landscapes of this area. Since 1794 it settles with Naples and product of many watercolours of the Vesuvius and antiquities of Campagnie. In Malta with the English troops in 1800-1801, it paints topographic sights of Valette.

Of return in Switzerland since 1807, it makes several unfruitful attempts found an art school in Lausanne. Honorary member of the Company of Arts of Geneva, Ducros exposes his works to Bern thanks to the support of Sigmund Wagner, is named professor of painting to the academy of Bern in September 1809 a few months before his death. Its funds of workshop, repurchased by the State de Vaud in 1816, constitutes the original core of the cantonal museum of the fine arts of Lausanne. Regarded as a precursor of Turner, Ducros played a crucial role, as a protagonist of the preromantism, in the assertion of the watercolour like autonomous kind.

Bibliography

P. Chessex and Al, A.L.R.Ducros, cat. exhibition. Lausanne, 1986

Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros, cat. exhibition. Lausanne, 1998