Record drawing of an antique tripod base, possibly a candelabrum, each side of trapezium form, with a Bacchic relief; a faun at an altar (left), a seated figure and dog (centre), and figure holding a salver and urn. All with rams' heads at the top and sphinxes at the base. At one side is a detail of fruit dish.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol. 26/173

Purpose

Record drawing of an antique tripod base, possibly a candelabrum, each side of trapezium form, with a Bacchic relief; a faun at an altar (left), a seated figure and dog (centre), and figure holding a salver and urn. All with rams' heads at the top and sphinxes at the base. At one side is a detail of fruit dish.

Aspect

Elevations and detail

Signed and dated

Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey wash382 x 550, two parallel vertical foldlines

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist

Watermark

Initials

Notes

The tripod candelabrum was probably derived from the set of ancient candelabra bearing the attributes of the Four Seasons that were in the Palazzo Farnesina, Rome in the mid-eighteenth century (see P. Bober & R. Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, Oxford, 2011, cat. 57, 89); the rams' heads and sphinxes are almost identical to those shown here. There is another less classical variation in Adam vol.26/65. There is also a pair of antique pedestals, but with different sculptural panels, in Adam's sculpture gallery at Newby Hall for which there are drawings in the Albani Collection at Windsor (see Carlos Picón, 'Two neo-Attic pedestals at Newby Hall', Burlington Magazine, no.991 vol.CXXVII, October 1985, pp.706-713). There was a similar tripod candelabrum in the Lyde Brown Collection, Wimbledon (see J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, New Haven and London, 1997, pp.141-2).

Notes updated in 2023 thanks to assistance from Professor James Grantham Turner

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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