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  • image Adam vol.57/34

Reference number

Adam vol.57/34

Purpose

Italy: ? Mare Piano. View of a small town, possibly Mare Piano on the Gulf of Pozzuoli, on a rocky setting above a lake fed by three waterfalls, above which is a three-bay aqueduct in a wooded landscape

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 34

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably either 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey and brown washes176 x 327

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

It is possible that this is a view from the seaside of the village of Mare Piano at the extreme (Neapolitan) end of the Gulf of Pozzuoli, of which there is a plan and view in Abbé de Saint-Non, Voyage Pittoresque en Sicile et Naples, Paris, 1781-6, vol.II, pp.159 & 163. Robert Adam's view, however, comes closer to the print of the Isola di Liri at Sora, see Saint-Non, 1781-6, vol.II, pl.120, opp. p.253; Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau made a tour there in June 1756 for which there is a drawings in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 153), (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pp.208-211) and a large one in S.M. Adam vol.1/244. This view may have been included here (in this volume) since Sora was on the route to Rome via Monte Cassino that Adam took on his return journey from Naples, and consequently may be dated April 1755 rather than the following year; see also Adam vol.57/1.

Level

Drawing

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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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