Unfinished capriccio of a seated figure on a square base beside a larger monument with a decorated sarcophagus on top, surrounded by classical fragments at the edge of a columned and pilastered temple, with trees in the background.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 57

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Reference number

Adam vol.57/136

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio of a seated figure on a square base beside a larger monument with a decorated sarcophagus on top, surrounded by classical fragments at the edge of a columned and pilastered temple, with trees in the background.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 136

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey wash215 x 290

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau

Notes

This is an unfinished sketch for a more elaborate watercolour composition, as are the pencil and pen drawings in Adam vol.57/144 and 57/146. There are several further similar ones in The Hermitage collection (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995). Both the strigillated sarcophagus and the seated classical figure are stock motifs in such works (see Paris catalogue, 1995, op. cit., pl.56 and fig.5), and can be compared with the sarcophagus series in Adam volume 56, for example 56/71-3.

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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