Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Scotland: Midlothian: Hawthornden. View of the partially-ruined castle at Hawthornden, set high on rocks above a wooded gorge of the North Esk river, with a seated figure in the foreground to the right.
  • image Adam vol.56/26

Reference number

Adam vol.56/26

Purpose

Scotland: Midlothian: Hawthornden. View of the partially-ruined castle at Hawthornden, set high on rocks above a wooded gorge of the North Esk river, with a seated figure in the foreground to the right.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in red ink 26

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably late 1740s

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and pen;watercolour240 x 388

Hand

Paul Sandby

Notes

This drawing by Paul Sandby (1725-1809) presumably belongs to his Scottish period of the late 1740s, and may be compared with a similar view he made of Bonnington Linn, Strathclyde, of c.1750 (see Holloway The Discovery of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1978), p.48). There is a virtually identical view by Hugh William Williams (1773-1829) made in 1796 (see Holloway, op.cit, p.84, fig.80). The castle was largely rebuilt in the seventeenth century and was a favourite subject for topographers in the later eighteenth century. The Sandby view in Adam vol.56/155 is of the same date as this drawing and is probably also a landscape of the North Esk.

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).