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  • image Adam vol.57/116

Reference number

Adam vol.57/116

Purpose

Capriccio of a statue on a plinth beside a ruined archway. Above the arch is an inscribed panel. Below the statue eight steps lead to a courtyard, seen through the arch, with a three-bay arcade.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 116

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown and blue washes187 x 122

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The archway depicted is a variation either on the Arch of Dolabella and Silanus, or the more popular Arch of Titus, of which Charles-Louis Clérisseau made numerous drawings, but the rest of the composition is invention in the latter's style. A similar figure on a plinth appears in the views by Robert Adam and Clérisseau of the riverside at the Forum Boarium (see Clerk Collection, Scotland, Clerk 75 and Clerk 76).

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).