Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Unfinished capriccio showing a plan of a courtyard building with colonnaded quadrants linking four pavilions with other, possibly circular pavilions at the four corners.
  • image Adam vol.55/171 extra
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.55/171 extra

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing a plan of a courtyard building with colonnaded quadrants linking four pavilions with other, possibly circular pavilions at the four corners.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1757

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk 170? x 220 drawing size

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This chalk plan is drawn directly onto one of the original pages of the album to which the collection of drawings has been mounted. There is a similar large courtyard scheme in Adam vol.55/28 and several in volume 9 (see Adam vol.9/45 recto and verso). The drawing thus appears to be contemporary with the other exercises in this and similar volumes and makes clear that the volume was acquired and used by Robert Adam for some purpose around 1757, and the drawings were inserted subsequently (see Adam vol.55/107). There is a similar instance of an additional page inserted after Adam vol.55/179, and another plan similarly drawn on the original page of the album at the start of this volume (see Adam vol.55/1 extra).
This suggests that the purpose of this volume was always to contain architectural exercises of some sort, presumably commenced in Italy around 1755.

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).