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  • image Adam vol.7/98
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/98

Purpose

Unfinished view showing groups of figures, a sedan chair, and a carriage with two horses, in front of and admiring a large building of seven bays.

Aspect

Perspective

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash 179 x 758, two sheets jopined and with two vertical fold lines

Hand

Antonio Zucchi

Notes

The figures here were intended to give scale and depth to the building that is shown behind in diagrammatic form, and which is possibly the elevation of James Adam's Parliament House (see Adam vol.7/78) or his royal theatre (see Adam vol.7/170). The foreground figures are in the hand of Antonio Zucchi (1726-95), and the building behind was possibly intended to be drawn in a more architectural style, perhaps by George Richardson (d. c.1813). The direct source may be the drawings of the Trevi Fountain in Rome (see Adam vol.56/55-57).
Such a composition is typical of the later perspectives of Robert Adam, but can be seen as early as 1760 in his Admiralty Screen, separating Admiralty House from Whitehall, London (see Ministry of Defence Art Collection, London, MOD11110).

Literature

Repr. J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.314 (detail of sedan chair)

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).