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  • image Adam vol.56/114

Reference number

Adam vol.56/114

Purpose

Capriccio showing a square mausoleum or small villa on two floors with pedimental attic storey, a circular cupola and shallow dome above. It is approached by a ramped stair, with figures and animals in the foreground landscape.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 74; in red ink 114

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown and grey washes201 x 300, 4 corners trimmed diagonally

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This composition is untypical of the other capricci in this volume in that it shows a building that is not in ruins. It more closely resembles drawings of small buildings that are found in Adam volume 55 (see Adam vol.55/51 verso) and can also be compared with the square pavilion depicted in Adam vol.56/54. However, the compositions in volume 55 generally lack the carefully drawn landscape setting shown here. One of the foreground figures is shown sketching the scene, watched by the other figure. The classical source for this composition may be the mausoleum Camare Sepolcrati on the Via Attica, a view of which is found in Piranesi Le Antichità Romane (1756), pl.I, Title page to vol.I).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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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