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  • image Adam vol.55/32
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/32

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing columns and pilasters supporting round-headed vaults on two levels, possibly ruinous. In the distance are more vaults and coffering.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 32

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk186 x 249

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau (attributed to)

Watermark

star in circle

Notes

There is a group of similar sketches showing ruins in this volume, see Adam vol.55/71-77, all executed in a deliberately casual style, and which may have served as the inspiration for watercolours by both Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau. Among this group, Adam vol.55/75 is close in spirit to the composition shown here; both are in black chalk and are probably related to the watercolour attributed to Clérisseau in Adam vol.55/67. There is another group of similar drawings in Adam volume 56, see Adam vol.56/87-108, several of which are by Clérisseau.

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).