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  • image Adam vol.55/8
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/8

Purpose

Capriccio showing a building with a main block in elevation with a dome on two drums flanked by spires, linked by a balustrade above a pedimented five-bay portico. On either side are domed pavilions with pediments, thermal windows and a coffered three-bay exedra. Also on sheet: pencil sketch plan.

Aspect

Elevation, planverso capriccio

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 8

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash over pencil271 x 230 The sheet has two vertcal foldlines

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Unfinished capriccio in pencil showing a fortified entrance to a walled town that has a tower with short spire and other irregular buildings, some classical. Also the lower part of a figure.

Watermark

bird on monti

Notes

This composition may be compared with the perspective in Adam vol.55/3, which shows much the same design but with different and simpler wings, and with Adam vol.55/22, which has larger ones. It may also be regarded as a variant exercise on Adam vol.55/7 and 11. The pencil drawing on the folded part of the sheet is a version of the drawing in Adam vol.55/16 and also the scheme in Adam vol.9/62. There is a loose version of part of the sketch plan on English watermarked paper in the Italian section in the Dewez drawings in the Rijksarchief, Brussels, Belgium (see Dewez 1/64A). This drawing belongs with Adam vol.55/10, 11 and 14 as a small group of symmetrical elevations with wings and a domed centre block.

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).