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  • image Adam vol.55/144

Reference number

Adam vol.55/144

Purpose

Capricci showing a view and three plans, two of which are unfinished, of a three-bay pavilion with a three-bay projecting portico on oval steps and basement; it has a simple pitched and tiled roof. One plan shows the interior of niches and columns. Below is an additional plan of a circular hall with apsidal columns and another similar plan.

Aspect

Perspective, plans verso plans, elevations

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 144

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly 1755

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk, grey wash 228 x 343

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capricci in pencil of four plans and three elevations. Two of the plans, one of which is unfinished, show a courtyarded building with a circular columned hall; another plan is for part of a quadrant with two pavilions, with the elevation above. The fourth plan is of the interior of a rectangular hall, above which is an elevation of two coffered niches with a three-bay screen of columns. The most finished of the elevations can be compared with Adam vol.55/141 and the elevations and plans with the two elevations in Adam vol.55/146 recto.

Watermark

partial names

Notes

The perspective is similar in character to one of the pavilions that constitute the sixteenth-century Villa Pia in the Vatican, Rome. It may also be compared with the small Temple of Clitumnus at Spoleto, Italy, which Robert Adam knew from Palladio as well as having visited in September 1755 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.180). His studies of the temple are in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (see Clerk 163-7).

Level

Drawing

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

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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.

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