Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Unfinished capriccio showing a draped figure seated on a strigillated sarcophagus within a projecting niche, with more niches on either side. To one side is a composition of a pyramid, arcade and round tower.
  • image Adam vol.4/67
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.4/67

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing a draped figure seated on a strigillated sarcophagus within a projecting niche, with more niches on either side. To one side is a composition of a pyramid, arcade and round tower.

Aspect

Perspectives

Signed and dated

  • Undated, possibly 1755-56

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen193 x 267

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 55.Probably showing a niche tomb, this is a more sophisticated version of the drawing in Adam vol.55/115. The unfinished pyramidal composition may be compared with those in Adam vol.55/104-107. Although all are unfinished, it is evident that the tomb capriccio was to be inked over the pencil.

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).