Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing a partially-ruined interior with central columns supporting a vaulted roof. A thermal window looks into a curved colonnade, which has a screen on one side and an aedicular window on the other, and relief sculpture.
  • image Adam vol.55/73
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.55/73

Purpose

Capriccio showing a partially-ruined interior with central columns supporting a vaulted roof. A thermal window looks into a curved colonnade, which has a screen on one side and an aedicular window on the other, and relief sculpture.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

In ink 73

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen182 x 216

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

star in circle

Notes

This composition is part of a group of mostly ink drawings, Adam vol.55/71-77, executed in a deliberately casual style that may have served as the inspiration for more elaborate watercolours by both Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) that can be seen in volume 56, see Adam vol.56/123, and in this volume in Adam vol.55/67. This drawing, attributed to Robert Adam by John Fleming without comment (see caption to fig.8, J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.166), differs from the less free drawings in 55/71 and 76 that are likewise attributed to Adam. The lower of the two small pen sketches on the verso of Adam vol.55/81 may be a source for this composition.

Literature

Rep. J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, fig.8, p.166.

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).