Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Scotland: unidentified location. View of an expansive, flat and wooded landscape with large deciduous trees in the foreground; in the distance is a group of figures beneath low a tree, beyond which is a symmetrical building with a flat roof.
  • image Adam vol.56/27

Reference number

Adam vol.56/27

Purpose

Scotland: unidentified location. View of an expansive, flat and wooded landscape with large deciduous trees in the foreground; in the distance is a group of figures beneath low a tree, beyond which is a symmetrical building with a flat roof.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in red ink 27

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably c.1750

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil; brown and grey washes347 x 460

Hand

Paul Sandby (attributed to) or possibly Jean-Baptiste-Claude Chatelain

Notes

This drawing in pen and wash is typical of Paul Sandby's work of c.1750 and particularly his Scottish views (see Holloway The Discovery of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1978), figs.33-49). Both Paul and Thomas Sandby were associated with the Adam family from around 1746 and Paul Sandby later worked for Robert Adam on the plates for Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro (1764). Robert Adam was in close contact with Sandby while he was in Italy, asking his sister in a letter of December 1756 'did you see Sandby in your London Life?', as he had sent him a long letter (National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh, Clerk of Penicuik Collection, GD18/4827). Alternatively, it has been suggested by Dr Timothy Clifford that this drawing is by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Chatelain (c.1710-c.1771), whom Adam may have known through Chatelain's work as an engraver of Gaspard Dughet (see Adam vol.56/23).

Literature

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, 1996, cat.2

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.

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).