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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Possibly unfinished capriccio showing an irregular building of several stories with tower, colonnades, battlements and an external rustic staircase. It is in a wooded and hilly setting and is approached over a bridge. In the foreground centre are rocks and vegetation.
  • image Image 1 for Adam vol.54/Series 5/10
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  • image Image 1 for Adam vol.54/Series 5/10
  • image Image 2 for Adam vol.54/Series 5/10

Reference number

Adam vol.54/Series 5/10

Purpose

Possibly unfinished capriccio showing an irregular building of several stories with tower, colonnades, battlements and an external rustic staircase. It is in a wooded and hilly setting and is approached over a bridge. In the foreground centre are rocks and vegetation.

Aspect

Perspectiveverso perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 10

Signed and dated

  • Undated, but datable to1755 - 57

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil183 x 300

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pen capriccio showing a landscape with two circular buildings, one a version of the other, on top of wooded hills. One appears to have a thatched dome on an arcaded drum with three bays below. The other, which is in the distance, is similar but overgrown.

Watermark

crown and royal arms

Notes

Both the architecture and landscape here are typical of Robert Adam's Roman period and his taste for the picturesque. It might equally have been inspired by the picturesque landscape Adam passed through on his return journey from Italy in 1757. The building may be compared with a similar, but earlier, composition of a hilltop group in Adam vol.56/12.

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).