Johann Christoph Brotze (Latvian: Johans Kristofs Broce; 1 September 1742 – 4 August 1823) was a German pedagogue, artist and ethnographer.
Brotze was born in Görlitz, Electorate of Saxony. He studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg, and was also skilled at technical drawing. He went to Riga in Livonia in 1768 and spent the next 46 years as a teacher at the Riga Imperial Lyceum.[1]
During that period he collected historical data and depicted in drawings and paintings everything he saw around him in his everyday life, as well as most buildings and monuments of significance in Livonia, supplemented with extensive descriptions. Today his works are considered an extremely valuable source of information for historians.