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  • image Adam vol.9/67
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/67

Purpose

Design for an urn on a pedestal. The urn has two handles and a pine cone finial. It stands on a square plinth decorated with an eagle above a swag and a lion mask. Below the urn and to its right are unfinished drawings of a foot and a hand. There are pen tryouts at the top left of the sheet

Aspect

Elevation and detailsVerso, drawing of deciduous foliage

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 67

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 1756

Medium and dimensions

Pen, black chalk; verso black chalk157 x 110

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Drawing of deciduous foliage in black chalk.

Notes

There are similar urn compositions in Adam vol.55/114 and all may be related to those given in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's collected edition of Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcophagi, etc., Rome, 1778. The drawings of the hand and foot show that the sheet has been re-used, as does the foliage on the verso. The figure drawings on the verso of Adam vol.54/Series 5/5 are similar to those here.

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).