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  • image Adam vol.55/139
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/139

Purpose

Capricci showing two elevations, one of which is cropped in trimming the sheet and a section through a ruined, vaulted interior. The upper elevation shows a three-bay apse flanked by niches between pilasters. The lower elevation has five bays with three pedimented doors and three domes above on decorated attic panels. The two smaller of these have cupolas.

Aspect

Elevations, section verso plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 139

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen, black chalk 158 x 111

Hand

Robert Adam and attributed to Jean-Baptiste Lallemand

Verso

Unfinished capriccio in pen and black chalk showing a plan of a building with a central hall, two oval staircases and an entrance between projecting wings.

Watermark

coat of arms [remains]

Notes

The small section in chalk is probably not in Robert Adam's hand and it may be a sketch for Adam to work up, as is the case in Adam vol.55/97, and like that drawing it may be by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803). There are larger pen drawings by Robert Adam for such vaulted rooms in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (see A. Rowan, Catalogues of Architectural Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Robert Adam, London, 1988, p.33). The lower elevation may be compared with that in Adam vol.55/129.

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).