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  • image Adam vol.56/116
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/116

Purpose

Capriccio showing a triumphal archway with attic storey above. To one side are two free-standing columns, one having a statue on top; another statue of a seated figure on a base is shown beside a large fragment of a frieze in the foreground.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 76; in red ink 116

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey and brown washes; ink framing line225 x 178, 2 top corners trimmed, bottom left corner damaged

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The arch depicted here is loosely based on the Arch of Constantine in The Forum, Rome. The statue of a seated figure also appears in Adam vol.56/75 and 56/96, and more clearly in several compositions by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, pp.18, 143). Robert Adam's composition is simpler and lacks the figures in the Clérisseau original from which it is taken (see Hermitage 43672, Paris 1995 op.cit., fig.5).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

In Pursuit of Antiquity: Drawings by the Giants of British Neo-Classicism, Sir John Soane's Museum, 1 February - 1 June 2008; Tchoban Foundation Museum für Architekturzeichnung, Berlin, 3 October 2015 - 14 February 2016

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).