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  • image Adam vol.26/93

Reference number

Adam vol.26/93

Purpose

Record drawing of part of a ceiling showing a rectangular panel of several figures, above which is a swagged curtain. It is surrounded by two borders, one of putti, and other of stylised flowers.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, watercolour 567 x 1045; with vertical fold line

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Watermark

Trimmed remains of countermark

Notes

This drawing and its companion in Adam vol.26/94 are both watercolours that are more typical of those found in the Manocchi drawings in Adam volumes 15 and 16. This drawing differs only in detail from a watercolour amongst the drawings by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) in Box E in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia (1862) that is annotated 'Chambre de livie au palais des empereurs à Rome' (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.100). According to the Hermitage catalogue, 'Il est fort probable que la source soit une planche gravée' ('it is highly likely that the source was an engraving'); the hand there is also likely to be that of Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82). It is possible that this is one of the three ceilings from 'Livia's Baths' that James Adam referred to in 1762 as '... painted and so pretty and so rare that I thought I could not have them done with too much care' (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, London, 1962, p.371). There is another drawing of one of the ceilings in Adam vol.26/169.

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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