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  • image Adam vol.56/131
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/131

Purpose

Capriccio showing the interior of a large building with coffered ceiling supported by free-standing columns, with the walls containing niches and relief panels. At one end is a screen of five bays.

Aspect

Perspectiveverso Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 94; in red ink 131.

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown and grey washes; ink framing line270 x 302, 4 corners trimmed diagonally

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Unfinished pencil capriccio showing the plan for a large building, which may be related to the drawing on the recto.

Watermark

Part of fleur de lys

Notes

Although arranged in the album among capricci of ruins, the composition here is the first of an intermittent sequence of capricci of interiors of complete buildings, such as the compositions in Adam vol.56/132, 136, 138, 142 and 145. The vaulted hall in this drawing is comparable with a similar hall in an unfinished pencil drawing in Adam vol.55/118. Although this drawing is a capriccio, Robert Adam may have been inspired by Santa Maria degli Angeli by Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1773), which he knew and drew (see Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.352; also Clerk Collection, Scotland, Clerk 3 & 5).

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).