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  • image Adam vol.55/54
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/54

Purpose

Decorative design for a panel of relief sculpture showing two, winged anthropomorphic putti with a griffin with scrolling tail.

Aspect

Elevationverso elevation, plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 54

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen, black chalk115 x 200

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capriccio in pen showing part of an elevation of a portico with balustrade above and rusticated tower; also a small plan of a colonnaded square with apsidal end.

Notes

Robert Adam's inspiration for such a panel comes from the classical reliefs in either the Temple of the Sun, or that of Antoninus and Faustina, in Rome, Italy, and were used by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) in his decoration of his Roman House or Museum for Catherine II of Russia (see T. McCormick, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and the Genesis of Neo-Classicism, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1990, p.187). There are drawings after both sources in Adam volume 26, which were probably acquired by James Adam in Rome.

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).