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  • image Adam vol.56/95
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/95

Purpose

Capriccio showing a ruined hall, partly roofed, with a coffered apse at one end and pilastered walls. In the foreground is a sarcophagus supported on sphinxes. To the right are architectural fragments, including one depicting three heads in relief.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 53; in red ink on drawing 95

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, blue, brown and grey washes342 x 246, 4 corners trimmed diagonally

Hand

Robert Adam (attributed to)

Notes

The use of a figure relief in the foreground is also found in Adam vol.56/98, and less strikingly in 56/102; the motif of three heads also appears in 56/107. Apart from the viewpoint, the ruined interior and sarcophagus are familiar themes (for example, Adam vol.56/104). This drawing may be compared with a set of compositions by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in The Hermitage (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg catalogue of exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.147). There is a copy of this drawing by C J Richardson (1806-1871) in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (P&D 93.G.8/19).

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).