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  • image Adam vol.54/Series 4/2
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Reference number

Adam vol.54/Series 4/2

Purpose

Capriccio showing the façade of a church with three spires on top of heavily decorated towers, with a central rose window above an arcade with apsidal doorway.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 2; at top of drawing in ink in Robert Adam's hand Fabrique Gotisque desinée en descendant le Rhin/ [two words crossed through] Idee prise dune Eglise sur le Cote de Dil Fleuve. 1 Decem'r 1757/ proche de Coblentz

Signed and dated

  • 1 December 1757

Medium and dimensions

Pen156 x 133

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Part of eight lines of calculations in ink and in a contemporary hand petit gris / paul [?]

Watermark

fleur de lys

Notes

This composition is a version of the unfinished pen elevation in Adam vol.54/Series 4/6, although the design here is for a symmetrical building and incorporates classical details. This drawing is Robert Adam's only reference to the German Gothic that he saw in his passage up the Rhine, although the arcaded entrance is Romanesque rather than Gothic and may have been inspired by seeing S.Gereon in Cologne, Germany.

Literature

Repr. J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.243, fig.12.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).