Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing a symmetrical building in a landscape setting. It has a central drum, dome and cupola, flanked by four towers with spires joined by a colonnade, with a five-bay portico on steps with flanking arcaded wings.
  • image Adam vol.55/3

Reference number

Adam vol.55/3

Purpose

Capriccio showing a symmetrical building in a landscape setting. It has a central drum, dome and cupola, flanked by four towers with spires joined by a colonnade, with a five-bay portico on steps with flanking arcaded wings.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 3

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1757

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash152 x 182

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

As with Adam vol.55/2, this drawing may be compared with the landscape capricci found in Adam vol.54/Series 5/1-19. A similar design is found in Adam vol.55/8, which also has spires flanking a central dome. According to John Fleming, this drawing belongs to a group of '. . . surprising capricci in the Gothic taste in which he appears to have indulged from time to time despite Clérisseau's disapproval' (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.229). Fleming dates this drawing to 1757, largely on the strength of its stylistic similarity to the Gothic scheme of December 1757 found in Adam vol.54/Series 4/2.

Literature

Rep. J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pl.64

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).