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  • image Adam vol.55/46

Reference number

Adam vol.55/46

Purpose

Capriccio showing three small plans for a Latin Cross type building with apsidal ends and porticoes; three elevations for a domed building with portico and flanking wing or wings.

Aspect

Plans, elevationsverso perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 46

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pencil253 x 205, folded with a vertical foldline, trimmed at top edge

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capricci in pen and grey wash showing in perspective the corner of a portico with cornice capitals and tops of columns, and a broken fluted column in a landscape setting with a bridge in the background. The broken column may be based on one that Robert Adam drew at Aquino during the Sora tour in 1756, see Clerk Collection, Scotland, Clerk 158.

Watermark

letters

Notes

The elevations are versions of the composition shown on the verso of Adam vol.55/45 and bear little relation to the three plans. The scale of these plans and elevations, like those in 55/45, can be compared with similar drawings in Adam volume 9 in pencil, chalk and pen, which are associated with Robert Adam's instruction in architecture by Laurent-Benoít Dewez, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and others. The apsidal elevation is probably an earlier version of that in Adam vol.55/63.

Level

Drawing

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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.

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