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  • image Adam vol.55/75
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/75

Purpose

Capriccio showing a group of classical ruins around a courtyard, with two walls and the remains of a coffered ceiling. A portico at one end is linked by pilasters to an open screen; above the portico is a relief panel and belvedere.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 75

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk190 x 270

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau (attributed to)

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. The latter watercolour, which is by Clérisseau, is a larger version of this composition and shows perspective lines that would indicate it was taken from a sketch such as this, and worked up either by Adam, as in 55/74, or by Clérisseau. There is possibly a detail of the vaulted upper storey in Adam vol.55/32.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).