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  • image Adam vol.55/26
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/26

Purpose

Capriccio showing an apsidal elevation of four niches filled with sculpture on either side of a recessed and coffered doorway with eight pilasters above, supporting a plain cornice. A detail of a doorway niche with coffering and four columns, with sketch plan below; detail of rustication.

Aspect

Elevation, plan, detailsverso details, plan (part)

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 26

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk277 x 396, folded with a vertical fold-line

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Black chalk details of a curved niche with four columns; plan below; detail of column heads adn rectangular panel; unfinished sketch of part of a plan with piers and columns; detail of metope and triglyph.

Watermark

dove on monti

Notes

The drawings for a niche on both recto and verso of the sheet relate to the chalk elevation in Adam vol.55/145; all of these drawings may relate to the oval interior shown in Adam vol.55/147. The elevation may be for a circular mausoleum-like building; it can be compared with the smaller elevation and two plans found in Adam vol.55/150, which shows the elevation as supporting some form of obelisk structure, and also with the drawing in Adam vol.9/17 verso.

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).