View of the garden of the Villa Ludovisi in Rome, showing deciduous trees, conifers and ruined, overgrown city walls at the Porta Pinciana, at the base of which are assembled architectural fragments.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 56

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Reference number

Adam vol.56/150

Purpose

View of the garden of the Villa Ludovisi in Rome, showing deciduous trees, conifers and ruined, overgrown city walls at the Porta Pinciana, at the base of which are assembled architectural fragments.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on right-hand side of drawing 5; in red ink on drawing and on album leaf 150.

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, black chalk, grey washes; ink framing line beyond which is blue painted border254 x 369

Hand

Jean-Baptiste Lallemand

Notes

This drawing is one of a set of six Roman views (Adam vol.56/149-154) by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803), all of which have contemporaneous painted borders and have central folds, and most of which are signed. There were several similar sets in the Adam sales of 1818 and 1821 (see Catalogue of A Valuable Collection of Antique Sculpture etc. R. Adam, Christie's, London, 21 & 22 May 1818 and Christie's London Catalogue of the Effects of Robert Adam Esq. Dec. 9 July 1821 & following days). Lot 32 of the second day sale of 1818 was described as 'Six elegant drawings in India ink by L'Alma, of Italian Garden scenery', and lot 29 contained several of Lallemand's landscapes, all of which were bought by John Soane (see Bolton The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 2 vols. (London, 1922), II, p.331). The set was probably made in 1756 for Robert Adam, at the time when he described himself as '... applying myself to these kind of sketches and have already made out a dozen of different views as unlike one another as I could ...' (Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.363). Adam vol.56/153 shows a drawing of the Casino dell'Aurora at the Villa Ludovisi. The fragments at the base of the walls in this drawing may well have been those indicated at the top of the plan of the gardens by Giovanni Battista Falda (d.1678) in his Vedute di Roma (Rome, 1665), 'Pianta del Giardino ... Principi Ludovisi', a copy of which was bought by John Soane as lot 120 on the second day of the Adam sale of 1818, together with the Fontane di Roma.

Literature

Rep. Tait Robert Adam: drawings and imagination (Cambridge, 1993), p.20, fig.15

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999
The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).