Capriccio showing a landscape with a bent tree in the foreground beside a sarcophagus. In the background are domed buildings with porticoes beside a four-arched causeway. In the foreground are architectural fragments.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam volume 54, Series 4 and 5

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Reference number

Adam vol.54/Series 5/2

Purpose

Capriccio showing a landscape with a bent tree in the foreground beside a sarcophagus. In the background are domed buildings with porticoes beside a four-arched causeway. In the foreground are architectural fragments.

Aspect

Perspectiveverso perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 2verso Lettered in pencil in a contemporary hand 36 - 90; in brown ink with a brush abcfo; and with chalk sums in columns

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1757

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk, brown, grey and blue washes; pencil framing lines on 3 sides, the right side missing328 x 227, torn on right side of sheet

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pen, chalk and grey wash capriccio showing a shallow domed building approached by a steep staircase on top of vaults, buttressed walls and colonnades. In the background is a medieval tower. This drawing is probably of two different periods as the ink composition does not match that in chalk.

Watermark

CM IV

Notes

The two capricci on recto and verso are typical of Robert Adam's Roman period and they can be compared with similar compositions in volume 56.The sheet has been badly torn on one side and only part of the cornice of a building remains. The drawing overlaps Adam vol.54/Series 5/1, and is possibly a later addition to the album.

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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