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  • image Adam vol.56/136
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/136

Purpose

Capriccio showing the interior of a vaulted and coffered hall with rooflight; the walls below are broken by a three-bay screen into another hall. On the other two walls are segmental arches and wall niches containing cineraria.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 99; in red ink 136.

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey wash; ink framing line237 x 306

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This elaborate composition is a companion to Adam vol.56/138 and 56/145, and to the larger framed gouache by Charles-Louis Clérisseau that is in the Sir John Soane Museum (SM P.326), which may have belonged to Robert Adam and which is signed, and dated twice, both 1771 and 1772. Robert Adam's drawing here lacks the figures depicted in the Clérisseau composition. The use of a large depressed arch characterises both this drawing and that in vol.56/138. In many ways the Adam drawing here can be regarded as a variation on the later gouache by Clérisseau, presumably a copy of an earlier original.

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).