Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing a shallow domed, circular building with outbuildings, including an obelisk on top of a small tower at the head of steps. This is set in a landscape with trees and rocks in the foreground.
  • image Adam vol.54/Series 5/1
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.54/Series 5/1

Purpose

Capriccio showing a shallow domed, circular building with outbuildings, including an obelisk on top of a small tower at the head of steps. This is set in a landscape with trees and rocks in the foreground.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 1

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly 1757

Medium and dimensions

Pen; with two vertical pencil framing lines202 x 206

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The composition of both buildings and landscape are typical of Robert Adam during his Roman period. The arching tree is a familiar motif and can be found in the next drawing in this volume, Adam vol.54/Series 5/2, and also in his tree studies in volume 56 (see Adam vol.56/10 and 31). The elevated pyramid, possibly a tomb, can be compared with the various capricci of tombs and sarcophagi in the same volume (see Adam vol.56/105). Another raised sarcophagus is seen in Adam vol.54/Series 5/6. The elements of fantasy can also be found in a group of drawings in volume 55 (see Adam vol.55/16, 18 and 20, of which 55/16 is closest in character to this drawing).

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).