Italy: Rome: the Trevi Fountain. View of the Trevi Fountain showing the façade and sculpture from the right, with the central figure of Oceanus flanked by the two tritons on rocks. The building is cut off above the head of the niche. In the foreground are groups of figures.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 56

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Reference number

Adam vol.56/57

Purpose

Italy: Rome: the Trevi Fountain. View of the Trevi Fountain showing the façade and sculpture from the right, with the central figure of Oceanus flanked by the two tritons on rocks. The building is cut off above the head of the niche. In the foreground are groups of figures.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 5; in red ink in 3 places, once on verso, twice on drawing, 57

Signed and dated

Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black chalk, watercolour and bodycolour, on grey paper454 x 738 (three sheets joined, narrow strips being added on each end of drawing)

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist

Verso

Number in red ink 57.

Watermark

crowned fleur de lys

Notes

This drawing is one of three views of the Trevi Fountain, originally numbered 4, 5 and 6 (see Adam vol.56/55 and 56/56). The viewpoint here is similar to that in vol.56/55 although the foreground is reduced. The fountain, by architect Nicola Salvi (d.1751)and sculptor Giovanni Battista Maini, was inaugurated in 1744, although unfinished, and is depicted in the view by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1695-1764) of 1744. Work was suspended during 1751 and 1758 and the fountain was only completed in 1762, after Robert Adam had left Rome (see Pinto The Trevi Fountain (London, 1986) for a full account of the history of the fountain). It seems likely that this drawing and Adam vol.56/55 and 56/56 were acquired from the same source as Laurent Pecheux's elevation of 1753 for Sir William Chambers (Harris & Snodin Sir William Chambers, Architect to George III (New Haven and London, 1997), see Soane Museum SM 22/2/8, illus. p.22), although the draughtsmanship here is very different in its liveliness and colour, and in the greater emphasis given to the sculpture over the architecture. Like Chambers, Robert Adam appears to have admired Salvi and regarded his work among '... what good buildings are in Rome ...' (see Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.359). The three views may well have been part of Adam's plan of 1755 '... to do the fountains ...' of Rome, using '... my own and our myrmidons' (Fleming 1962, p.152). He was also interested in, and drew, the aqueduct that fed Salvi's fountain (see Clerk Collection, Scotland, Clerk 106).

Literature

F. Sands, Fanciful Figures: people in architectural drawings, 2024, pp. 18-19

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.

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