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  • image Adam vol.57/153
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/153

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio of a group of classical fragments overgrown with vegetation, including a composite capital, frieze and cornice, and block of stone.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 153

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen232 x 185

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pen tryouts and in ink, a calculation.

Notes

This is a further exercise by Robert Adam in picturesque antiquity; it is similar to the drawing by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in Adam vol.57/140 and that by Adam in vol.57/137. All of these drawings may be compared with Piranesi's prints, particularly the foreground treatment, and with the studies of fragments of the Temple of the Sun in the Colonna gardens, Rome, in Adam volume 26, for example vol.26/52 and 69.

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).