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  • image Adam vol.57/58
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/58

Purpose

Italy: unidentified location. View of a group of rural tiled buildings, including a fortified rectangular tower in a landscape campagna setting. A bent cypress tree is on the left, with rocks in the foreground.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 58; on the verso in ink Rome: 3d January 1756

Signed and dated

  • 3 January 1756

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, grey wash156 x 205

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

There is another, more detailed view of this campagna subject in Adam vol.57/71, which is probably by Robert Adam after the style of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand. A pen and wash drawing in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 185) shows a similar group of buildings and tower, which may be the Torre di Traetto, now destroyed. The date inscribed on the verso of the drawing here suggests that similar small drawings in this section of Adam volume 57 belong to this period and follow those made by Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau in Naples in April 1755. In Adam's letter of 3rd January of 1756 he wrote that he was 'labouring at perspective and doing cornices with modillions, viewed on the angle of a building, which has its own difficulties' (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.202).

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).