Capriccio, or preliminary design for a funerary monument, c.1755-58

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Other
  - Unattributed drawings
    - Unattributed designs for funerary monuments and mausolea

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 4/18

Purpose

Capriccio, or preliminary design for a funerary monument, c.1755-58

Aspect

Elevation of a ruinous and overgrown funerary monument composed of a sargophagus with block feet surmounted by an inscription panel. To the bottom right-hand corner there is a detail of grotesque ornamentation

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

dimensions and calculations of costs

Signed and dated

c.1755-58

Medium and dimensions

Pen on sugar paper (245x210)

Hand

Adam, Robert (1728--1792) - Collections

Verso

Various pen drawings and inscriptions can be seen from the recto

Notes

This is exactly the sort of sketch made by Robert Adam during his Grand Tour of 1755-58.

Level

Drawing

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).