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  • image Adam vol.54/Series 5/6
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Reference number

Adam vol.54/Series 5/6

Purpose

Possibly unfinished capriccio showing a square sarcophagus supported by four garlanded herms. Beyond is a curving road with columned tombs set in a hillside with mountains beyond

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 6

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 57

Medium and dimensions

Pen186 x 235

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

GR and crown

Notes

The mountain landscape with a road at its foot appears with a similar pass in Adam vol.54/Series 5/18. These two drawings may have been immediately inspired by the journey Robert Adam had made to Ancona, Italy in September 1755, when he passed through the Passo del Furlo and Vespasian's Tunnel (see Clerk Collection, Scotland, Clerk 137 and 139), although it might equally have been inspired by the picturesque landscape Adam passed through on his return journey from Italy in 1757. The tombs carved from the rockface may have been taken from such a monument in eastern Turkey, which Adam knew at some stage (see Adam vol.2/122 and also Adam vol.55/99 verso). The drawing in Adam vol.4/119 may possibly be related to this one.

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).