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  • image Adam vol.4/122

Reference number

Adam vol.4/122

Purpose

Capriccio showing part of a ruined Colosseum-like building of three stories adjoining a two-bay cottage with small tower and balcony. Alongside is a roadway with three figures, one mounted, and a child beneath a tree.

Aspect

Perspective

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably c.1763

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey wash on brown washed paper276 x 381

Hand

Antonio Zucchi

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 26.This drawing may be compared with similar examples in the Blair Adam collection (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam at Home, Edinburgh, 1987, p.5), and it is dated to c.1763 (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, London, 1996, p.46). It may have been collected in Rome at that time when Antonio Zucchi (1726-95) was employed by James Adam.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999

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).