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  • image Adam vol.57/71
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/71

Purpose

Italy: unidentified location. View of a square tower with machicolations, surrounded by irregular domestic buildings in a rocky landscape, with a tree.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 71

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey and brown washes; pencil framing lines top and bottom, 131 x 185

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pencil and watercolour sketch of a tower on top of a high slope, which may have been a preliminary sketch for the more finished wash view.

Notes

This view by Robert Adam is similar in composition to Adam vol.57/58, which has a round rather than a square tower, and both can be related to six compositions by Charles-Louis Clérisseau for maison de campagne (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.148; Inv.2497-2502). A similar fortified village is also depicted in a watercolour attributed to Clérisseau in Adam vol.57/81. The composition and style of the drawing here show Adam working in the manner of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, as in Adam vol.57/58.

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).