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  • image Adam vol.4/104
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Reference number

Adam vol.4/104

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing the ruined interior of a barrel-vaulted hall with elaborate ceiling decoration, two Ionic columns with lintel and thermal window above. Beside a flanking wall are two free-standing statues on rectangular plinths.

Aspect

Perspective

Signed and dated

  • Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, ink framing lines303 x 363

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 56. This drawing may be the source for the more sophisticated watercolour in Adam vol.19/176, which is later and possibly not by Robert Adam. The composition here is closely modelled on those by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg catalogue of exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.140) and the other capricci in Adam volume 56. There is a drawing in a similar hand, also unfinished, in Adam vol.4/112.

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).