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  • image Adam vol.55/150
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/150

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing two small plans and an elevation for what is probably a mausoleum, arranged as a two-storey basement of a rectangular tower supporting an obelisk. This is composed of aedicular windows on a basement with columns in pairs above, supporting sculptural figures and the fluted base of thr obelisk column.

Aspect

Plans, elevation verso sketch elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 150 verso inscribed in pen in a contemporary hand To sett down my Sallad & / Lent Mr Hope 6 pauls

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755

Medium and dimensions

Pen 192 x 185

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Outline of a wall of three bays.

Watermark

[remains]

Notes

This drawing can presumably be dated to 1755. Charles Hope was with Robert Adam when he arrived in Rome in February 1755, but did not return from Naples with Adam in May. According to Adam '... but as I found he wanted to gull me out of a little more of my money by taking me to see palaces with him in order to pay half of his expense, I avoided him as I would Hell Fire ...' (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.179). There is also a strong Hope connection in Adam vol.55/40.
There is a larger unfinished chalk drawing for this scheme in Adam vol.55/26, but with a plain attic roof rather than an obelisk. The broken column or obelisk reappears in the pavilion in Adam vol.55/152. This composition may be contrasted with its Gothic counterpart in Adam vol.55/24.

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.

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