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  • image Adam vol.55/118
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/118

Purpose

Possibly unfinished capriccio showing the interior of a hall with coffered vaulting, below which are three large arches with three-bay screens joined by niches; another arch and vaulting opens to one side. Below on the sheet is a small plan for a square roof lantern.

Aspect

Perspective, plan verso perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 118

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk, ink 225 x 267

Hand

Robert Adam (attributed to)

Verso

Unfinished capriccio in black chalk showing an interior with curving colonnade seen from under a vaulted, coffered arch.

Notes

The inspiration for this capriccio may be the interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Rome, which Robert Adam visited and studied in June 1755, and of which there are views in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 3) (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.352 (note to p.161) and pl.63). Other comparable drawings are an unfinished interior in Adam vol.4/88; a pencil and chalk version of a similar composition in Adam vol.55/143 verso in the same hand, which may not be that of Robert Adam (see note to 55/143 verso attributing the drawing possibly to Clérisseau); and a composition by Adam in Adam vol.56/131.
The ink overdrawing serves to reduce the composition, cutting out the unfinished vaulted ceiling.

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).