Capriccio showing part of the interior of a curved building with a columned entrance through a barrel vault with niches and screens on either side. Above is a bold cornice with part of an attic storey. In the foreground are curved steps to water [?].

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 55

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Reference number

Adam vol.55/79

Purpose

Capriccio showing part of the interior of a curved building with a columned entrance through a barrel vault with niches and screens on either side. Above is a bold cornice with part of an attic storey. In the foreground are curved steps to water [?].

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 79

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen182 x 271

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

star in circle

Notes

This composition of vaulted and apsidal niches may be compared with that in Adam vol.56/136 and 138; both can be related to the gouache by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in Sir John Soane's Museum, SM P.97 (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, fig.14, although the drawing here lacks any funerary connotation and in this respect is closer to fig.67). The chalk drawing in Adam vol.55/80 may be an earlier version of this scheme, and the drawing in 55/86 may also be a source, as might be the plan in 55/42 if the foreground is indeed water.

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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