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  • image Adam vol.57/75
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/75

Purpose

Italy: ? Tivoli. View of the top of a waterfall, with rocks in the foreground and trees in the background.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 75

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black chalk, brown and grey washes220 x 313

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

bird on monti

Notes

This view may depict one of the numerous waterfalls around Tivoli, which both Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau drew. There is a similar view in chalk and brown wash, probably by Clérisseau, in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 115) that shows the complete waterfall with figures in the foreground. Both drawings may be compared with the waterfall at Terni, a fine drawing of which is in Adam vol.57/149, which Adam either collected or commissioned. Adam was frequently at Tivoli to see the painter Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), who had an apartment in the Villa d'Este (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.174). He visited Terni in September 1755 (see Fleming, 1962, op. cit. p.180).

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.

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