Lot 106: Jean Baptiste Louis Gros (French, 1793?-1870)

Jean Baptiste Louis Gros (French, 1793?-1870)
View of Patzcuaro, Mexico
oil on paper laid down on canvas
11¼ x 14½ in. 28.4 x 36.5 cm.

Jean-Baptiste Gros was posted to Lisbon and Egypt in diplomatic roles, and was nominated First Secretary of the French legation in Mexico in 1831-1836. Gros subsequently lived in Brazil (1836?-1838) and Columbia (1838-1842). Manuel Romero de Terreros's recorded fourteen Mexican views by Gros (Le baron Gros et ses vues sur le Mexique, Mexico, 1953, pp. 10-12). Pátzcuaro, the name given to a lake and a small Mexican town at the lake's edge, is situated in the Michoacán region in the South of Mexico and to the West of the Popcatépetl, where Gros took part in a crater-climbing expedition in the company of Daniel Thomas Egerton in 1834.