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  • image Adam vol.26/106
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/106

Purpose

Study of interior decoration showing part of a frieze with two incomplete panels, one rectangular, the other oval, both having framing figures; between them is scrolling foliage with animals and other figures.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Red chalk 226 x 399

Hand

Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (attributed to)

Notes

This frieze is unlikely to be antique and more probably is of the sixteenth century by Perino del Vaga (1501-47), perhaps inspired by similar compositions in the Vasari Album, which James Adam may have acquired when he was in Rome (see L. Fairbairn, Italian Renaissance Drawings from the Collection of the Sir John Soane's Museum, 2 vols., London, 1998, II, p.400). There are several compositions by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82) after 'perino del vargo' in album three of the Hardwick drawings in the RIBA (see 3/19, J. Lever, ed., Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, L-N, London, 1973, and a few sixteenth-century designs, 3/36). Along with the drawings of the interior of the Villa Albani, Rome (see Adam vol.26/46), and of the Cesi chapel of Santa Maria della Pace, Rome (see Adam vol.26/108-9), this drawing is probably one of the few decorative drawings not after the antique in this Adam volume.

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).