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  • image Adam vol.56/12
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/12

Purpose

Capriccio showing an irregular, towered building on a rocky hill above a road, along which a goatherd, dog and goats are going, towards a cascade edged with trees. In the distance are mountains.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in red ink 12

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1750s.

Medium and dimensions

Red chalk; pencil framing line300 x 413

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

fleur de lys

Notes

This drawing by Robert Adam is copied from a print by François Vivares that was published by Knapton and Pond in 1742, a copy of whose prints was in the library at Blair Adam (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawing and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.10). The source for the Vivares print was La Cascade by Gaspar Dughet (1615-1675), now in The Hermitage, but at Houghton Hall from 1740-79 (see M-N. Boisclair, Gaspard Dughet, Paris, 1986, pp.261, 349). There is another copy after Dughet from Pond and Knapton in Adam vol.56/23. The use of red chalk is found in Paul Sandby's Scottish work, and he may have introduced Adam both to this medium and to compositions of this type by Marco Ricci (1676-1730) (see A. P. Oppé, The Drawings of Paul and Thomas Sandby at Windsor Castle, London, 1962, p.15).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).