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  • image Adam vol.55/142
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/142

Purpose

Capricci showing two plans, one unfinished, and a view for a related centralised building with a shallow drum on a panelled drum, apsidal elevations and a central hall with apses and two oval staircases.

Aspect

Plans, perspective verso elevations, details

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 142 verso inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand glia Ld Hoptn - 17. 5 pauls / self 5.8 /

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly summer 1755

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen 155 x 247

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capricci in pen and black chalk showing two elevations of an apsidal building with shallow dome and flanking bays, one being a version of the other. Below are two profiles of a frieze and a cornice.

Watermark

partial names

Notes

The reference to Lord Hopetoun on the verso probably dates this drawing to the summer of 1755 when Robert Adam was in correspondence with him from Rome about a chimneypiece (see K. Eustace, 'Adam, Clérisseau, Rysbrack and the Hopetoun Chimneypiece', Burlington Magazine, vol.CXXIX, 1997, p.752). The plans and elevations on recto and verso of this sheet are for the same scheme and a variation on those in Adam vol.55/120; similar exercises are found in volume 9 (see Adam vol.9/13 and 68).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).