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  • image Adam vol.55/133
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/133

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing an elevation of a statue in a garlanded niche between arabesque pilasters, flanked by free-standing fluted columns with statues on top. An inscription panel forms the attic storey. To one side is part of a plan and elevation of a triumphal arch.

Aspect

Elevations, plan (part)verso plans, perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 133

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Chalk, pen, brown wash189 x 245

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capricci showing three sketch plans in black chalk and pen for an apsidal building. Also on the sheet is a drawing of a colonnade.

Notes

The elevation of this presumably funerary monument is composed of antique fragments from various sources rearranged in a tradition that Robert Adam would have found in work associated with Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) at the Villa Albani, Rome, Italy. A similar composition of antique fragments may be seen in Adam's fountain capriccio in Adam vol.55/113. The faint chalk drawing to one side is a continuation of the scheme and is to the same scale.

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).