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  • image Adam vol.57/146
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/146

Purpose

Capriccio of a group of stone blocks forming a fountain, with an antique lidless sarcophagus serving as the basin, being used by three washerwomen with baskets. In the background is a pilastered colonnade.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 146

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash280 x 221

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau

Notes

Charles-Louis Clérisseau's composition of stone blocks here is similar to that of antique fragments in his drawing in Adam vol.57/140, and to other drawings by Robert Adam in Adam vol.57/137 and 57/153. Washerwomen using a sarcophagus as their basin is a traditional motif found in views of the antique, and can be found in several similar compositions in Adam volume 56 (see for example Adam vol.56/92).

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).