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Reference number

Adam vol.7/186

Purpose

Academic study for a naked male figure holding a rope while seated on a cloak covering a rock.

Aspect

Perspective

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1761/62

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, brown wash on brown washed paper267 x 202

Hand

James Adam

Notes

This drawing would seem to be the sole remaining example of James Adam's figure studies, made while he was in Rome, and possibly in the drawing academy of Pompeo Batoni (1708-87) (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.61). In December 1762 Adam still had little faith in his figure and ornament drawing and was ' . . . not at all assured of my rules . . . ' (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.301).

Literature

Repr. A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.62, fig.51

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).