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  • image Adam vol.56/103
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/103

Purpose

Capriccio showing a sarcophagus re-used as the basin of a fountain set among ruins. In the foreground is water and in the distance a triumphal arch.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 62; in red ink on drawing and album leaf 103

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, blue, brown and grey washes; remnant of ink framing line at bottom180 x 237, 4 corners trimmed diagonally

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The triumphal arch depicted here resembles The Arch of Septimus Severus, Rome but the rest of the composition has no topographical basis in The Forum buildings. A fountain incorporating a re-used sarcophagus as its water basin also appears in many drawings (for example, Adam vol.56/94 and 56/97).

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).