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  • image Adam vol.55/100
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/100

Purpose

Capriccio showing a ruined circular temple with columns on a rusticated basement; to one side is an arcade and pyramid, and on the other side is a sarcophagus with architectural fragments in a landscape. At the top of the sheet is part of a plan of a circular building with projecting portico.

Aspect

Perspective, plan (part)verso details

Inscribed

In ink 100

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil135 x 159

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Ink wash drawing of several branches of trees in leaf.

Notes

There is a version of this composition in Adam vol.55/93 with modifications of the colonnade, and another variation in 55/104. A weak drawing attributed to Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) in Adam vol.56/120 reworks the same essential elements of pyramid and colonnade.

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).