Johann Christoph Brotze (1742 – 1823) was born in Gerlitz, studied theology and philosophy at universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg, he also mastered technical drawing. In 1768 Brotze moved to Riga where he worked as a tutor and since 1769 he has started to teach at Riga Lyceum where he has worked for 46 years. Brotze belonged to the trend of late humanism, so-called school of erudites. He considered collecting and processing of historical sources as his main task. Brotze collected historical materials and drew everything that seemed significant to him: people, buildings, coins, armorial bearings, plans of towns, technical innovations, etc., fixing everything with great preciseness and always adding written explanations which could sometimes contain just a couple of lines and sometimes occupied several pages. Many of the objects and documents drawn by him had perished or disappeared in the course of time, but information about them has been preserved only in Brotze’s drawings and descriptions which are summed up in his most significant work “Sammlung verschiedner Liefländischer Monumente ...”

This collection contains 10 volumes bound in leather (3246 pages; the page format is 33 x 21 cm). Most of the pictures drawn by Brotze are originals, but there are also plans and drawings made by other artists. A good deal of Brotze’s original pictures are one-colour drawings in Indian ink made with a pen. Coloured drawings are either water-colours or pen-drawings toned with water-colours. Unfortunately, some of the colours in these drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries have turned pale by now, for example, bluish and yellowish tones of the sky; in some cases just separate speckles remain.

In Brotze’s drawings and descriptions there are armorial bearings of the Baltic nobles, stamps and monuments of archbishops, bishops, towns, courts, churches as well as inscriptions on gravestones, buildings, bells, goblets and other things, views of Baltic estates, castles, towns and settlements, public edifices, dwelling houses, churches as well as topographic maps of separate places, inhabitants of towns and countryside, their clothes, lifestyle and profession and delineation of work process, different technical equipment (water-supply, telegraph, etc.). Here we can find information about many Latvian and Estonian towns. It was characteristic for Brotze’s work style to collect as much information about some town as possible. To show a town in development, Brotze collected plans drawn in different years, drew the most significant buildings of the town, and gave its historical description and economic and administrative characterization. He also gave information on inhabitants of the town and their occupation.