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  • image Adam vol.56/14
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/14

Purpose

Capriccio of a partially ruined tower on a small island or isthmus, approached over a single-span bridge, with another bridge and a small village in the distance. In the foreground is a waterfall with figures and cattle grazing nearby.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a later hand aged 16; in red ink 14

Signed and dated

  • September 1744

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and pen; ink framing line 303 x 432

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The ruined and battlemented tower depicted by Robert Adam is certainly Scottish and medieval, although the landscape setting with the figures in boats and the distant bridge seems invented. There are several Scottish castellated structures on, or near, islands, but none appears to correspond to Adam's composition here (see D. MacGibbon & T. Ross, The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland, 5 vols., Edinburgh, 1887).
In the Blair Adam collection there is also a view of the island castle of Loch Leven, Kinross-shire, Scotland, possibly made after a drawing by Clerk of Eldin (see BA 11).

This is a copy after a print by Vivares. For an example of the print see the print room at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, or for a print by Cruickshank after the Vivares print see the british Museum collection. Added December 2013 by the Curator of Drawings.

Literature

Rep. J. Lees-Milne, The Age of Adam, London, 1947, p.18

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).