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  • image Adam vol.54/Series 5/8
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Reference number

Adam vol.54/Series 5/8

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing a landscape with an irregular castle approached by a bridge in the distance. Below is a watermill and buildings. In the foreground is a small wooden footbridge over a stream.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 8

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly early 1750s, or 1757

Medium and dimensions

Pen, black chalk136 x 208

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This type of wooded landscape with buildings can be seen in Robert Adam's copies after seventeenth-century prints in volume 56 (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, pp.10-12). The careful draughtsmanship of this composition is more typical of Adam's work of the early 1750s before he left for Italy (see Adam vol.56/6 and 23, and also Adam vol.54/Series 5/10), although it might also have been executed during Adam's return journey from Italy in 1757.

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).