Capriccio showing a square building with shallow stepped dome and drum on a square base with thermal windows, below which is a double-pedimented elevation with coffered apsidal entrance. To one side is a portico between small pavilions. Also on sheet are a small view of a ruined pyramidal mausoleum with a pedimented basement, and a view of ruins beside a river in a woodland setting.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 55

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Reference number

Adam vol.55/51

Purpose

Capriccio showing a square building with shallow stepped dome and drum on a square base with thermal windows, below which is a double-pedimented elevation with coffered apsidal entrance. To one side is a portico between small pavilions. Also on sheet are a small view of a ruined pyramidal mausoleum with a pedimented basement, and a view of ruins beside a river in a woodland setting.

Aspect

Perspectivesverso perspectives

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 51

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen310 x 204

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capricci in pen, one showing a circular domed building on an arcade in the centre of wooded landscape beside a river; another depicts a square domed building in a wooded valley at the base of a cliff. The building has a shallow dome and cupola, below which is a three-bay portico with broken pediment flanked by single-bay pedimented wings. Like the square domed building on the recto this is a later version of that in Adam vol.55/155 verso.

Watermark

horned crown

Notes

The square domed building that appears on both recto and verso is a later version of that in Adam vol.55/155 verso, which shows proposed alterations to the drum space. There are other exercises on this theme in Adam vol.55/168-170. The small landscape sketches on recto and verso are similar in style to those found in Adam vol.55/100-110 and also in the landscape section of Adam volume 54/Series 5.

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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