Louis Ducros · 5 min read
A watercolour large enough to become a painting
For The Arch of Titus, Ducros pastes several sheets onto a canvas and gives watercolour an unusual scale. The Roman view later joins the holdings purchased by Vaud, contributing to the origins of Lausanne's museum.
Published on October 3, 2026
This watercolour refused to remain small. In The Arch of Titus, made between 1782 and 1787, Louis Ducros gives paper more than a metre in height. To reach this scale, he joins several sheets and fixes them onto a canvas. The Roman monument becomes the subject of a work that can take its place on a wall, framed beside oil paintings. The innovation is not merely virtuosity in colour. It begins with a very concrete material gesture: enlarging the support to enlarge the experience of looking.
The MCBA describes a technique combining pen, Indian ink, watercolour and gouache highlights on the assembled papers. The view measures one hundred and three by sixty-seven centimetres. This vertical format gives the arch an ample presence and lets trees rise above it. Ducros has then developed a clientele in Rome interested in monuments and landscapes. Such a large work offers these clients more than a small notation easily put away. The view can become a lasting presence in a room, with its architecture, air and inhabitants.
Looking at the work — In the MCBA reproduction, the arch occupies the centre, while nearby buildings close the sides. Its large opening reveals a brighter, more distant space. Above it, trees and vegetation extend beyond the stones; below, small figures animate the passage and its surroundings. The sky remains visible in an upper band. The composition turns the monument into a threshold: we look at its surface, then pass visually through it before returning to the figures that give the foreground a measure.
This relationship between architecture and vegetation distinguishes the view from a simple inventory of remains. Foliage is not placed in a park separate from the building. It appears in contact with the stones and accompanies their irregularity. Viewers can read an encounter between different durations, that of the monument and that of nature growing around it. The painting nevertheless provides no restoration report on the exact state of each part. It composes an experience of Rome in which ancient traces still belong to a living place.
The support's size allows this diversity to remain without reducing it to a single silhouette effect. A line can specify architecture; diluted colour opens the sky; a highlight makes a surface more visible. Paper gives these operations a presence different from a thick layer of oil. But the work does not renounce a painting's ambition. The MCBA stresses that Ducros had his large compositions glazed and framed. The assembly process thus prepares a display situation: an art often associated with a sheet acquires full independence on the wall.
This work's destiny subsequently joins that of a collection. Back in Lausanne, Ducros makes his own watercolours and his paintings by Italian masters available to pupils. After his death in 1810, a subscription is launched to prevent the collection's dispersal. In 1816, the canton of Vaud reimburses the subscribers and acquires these holdings. The MCBA chronology sees in them the origin of a collection exceeding six hundred and fifty works. The Arch of Titus itself records an acquisition in 1816: its Roman history becomes part of a Lausanne history.
These original holdings must be distinguished from the institution that develops later. The first cantonal museum is installed in the Academy in 1818; the Musée Arlaud opens in 1841. Meanwhile, the works also serve the gaze of those learning to draw. The large watercolour therefore finds several reasons to be preserved: it conveys a view of Italy, demonstrates a technique and belongs to a group that citizens, then a canton, chose to keep. Its ambitious format has a second life as an object available for repeated encounters.
Today, the assembled papers remain discreet before the represented monument's force. Yet their assembly enabled this breadth. Returning to the passage beneath the arch, we can think of the work's other passages: from motif to composed support, from Rome to Lausanne, from a painter's collection to a public collection. None erases its predecessor. The enlarged sheet retains its visual suppleness, and the painting retains its precision on paper. Ducros's view thus reminds us that a museum can also begin with an artist giving his medium more room.
