Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing a shallow, stepped, domed building with pediment; in front is a screen of columns and aedicular niches, with attic relief panels linked to three-bay pavilions with pediments.
  • image Adam vol.55/88
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.55/88

Purpose

Capriccio showing a shallow, stepped, domed building with pediment; in front is a screen of columns and aedicular niches, with attic relief panels linked to three-bay pavilions with pediments.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 88

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown and grey washes146 x 213

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The form of composition shown here, where one elevation is partially obscured by another, was typical of the more advanced designs associated with the Concorso Clementino. This can be seen in spectacular fashion in the prize-winning design by Robert Mylne (1734-1811) for the 1758 Concorso (see D. Stillman, English Neo-classical Architecture, 2 vols., London, 1988, I, p.55), and in Robert Adam's palace scheme of 1757 in Adam vol.28/1. There are similar schemes to the composition shown here in volume 9, see particularly Adam vol.9/166-8.

Literature

Rep. A. A. Tait, Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, London, 1996, p.22

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999

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).