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  • image Adam vol.55/48
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/48

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing three sides of the interior of a large hall with semi-engaged columns supporting vaulting, with a view to a curved arcade on steps, part of a doorway with pediment on consoles in an arch to one side.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing in two places (recto and verso) 48

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk279 x 402, with vertical fold line

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

crowned horn and letters

Notes

There are two other interiors of a similar type of building to that depicted here in Adam vol.55/81 and 118, the former showing an equally bold and informal style of drawing to that found here, which is closer in spirit perhaps to Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) than to Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).