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  • image Adam vol.21/79
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Reference number

Adam vol.21/79

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing a large palace with a pyramid, with a domed tower behind. On the right of the sheet is another tower with columns and colonnades. Overdrawn at the centre of the sheet is a statue on an inscribed pedestal.

Aspect

Elevation and a detailsverso Elevation, detail

Inscribed

Inscribed in chalk Top

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably c.1757

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black chalk476 x 276

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Unfinished capriccio in black chalk of an interior elevation with colonnades. Below this is a detail of a section of columns and dome.

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 55.This drawing is another version of the elevations in Adam vol.10/18 and 21/40; all use the characteristic form of the pyramid and may be related to a vast design for a palace (see Adam vol.28/1). The statue is probably that of Julius Caesar, the plinth lettered D.M./C.C.IULI, in a contemporary hand. The colonnaded tower is circled and may have been the source for the Bowood Mausoleum at Bowood House, Calne, Wiltshire of 1761-4. This shhet has been placed in the album ic close proximity to designs for the Bowoom mausolem, for example Adam vol.21/75 & 77.

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).