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  • image Adam vol.55/93
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/93

Purpose

Capriccio showing a ruined, circular and domed temple with columns and the remains of a pediment on a rusticated basement in a landscape setting; in the background are three bays of an arcade and possibly a pyramid. Also on the sheet is a coffered niche containing a group of possibly three funerary monuments and inscription panel.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 93

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen252 x 217

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

There is a similar composition in Adam vol.55/100, seen from a different angle with the pyramid and arcade very clearly in the background; another similar composition is in 55/104. These drawings suggest that small-scale and very informal sketches such as these were intended as the source for ruin compositions in the style of Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) or Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803), see particularly Adam vol.55/97.

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).