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Reference number

Adam vol.54/130

Purpose

Scotland: Midlothian, Roslin Castle. View showing castle and chapel in a wooded river valley. In the foreground is an irregular castellated building with towers approached by a causeway, beside which are cottages. Below this is an unfinished sketch of a church supported by buttresses.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand (possibly that of John Clerk) the height from ye Lodge of ye bridge to ye ground just over ye Center of ye / arch is 57 feet

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly around 1760

Medium and dimensions

Stump and pencil134 x 191, foldlines

Hand

John Clerk (attributed to)

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 56.The view is almost certainly Roslin Castle and Chapel seen from the valley of the North Esk river, and the inscription appears to be in the hand of John Clerk (1728-1812); there is an etching by Clerk of the castle (see J. G. Bertram, John Clerk of Eldin, Etchings and Drawings, Edinburgh, 1978, p.14). Clerk was a close friend of the Adam family, married to Susannah Adam and from 1745 a sketching companion of his brother-in-law Robert, particularly of topographical subjects. The neat and reasonably accurate style of this drawing is typical of Clerk's work of c.1760. It may have been folded in order to be enclosed in a letter sent to the Adam family in London.

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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