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  • image Adam vol.57/162
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/162

Purpose

Italy: Porto Fino. Unfinished view of Porto Fino on the Gulf of Genoa, seen from the sea.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in Robert Adam's hand Sketch of the point & part of the Town of Porto Fino from the Bay and Taken on the spot 18 January 1755; and in ink 162

Signed and dated

  • 18 January 1755

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen186 x 229

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This view was made after Robert Adam sailed from Genoa to Sestri Levante on 18 January 1755, disembarking at '... Lerici the next night after rowing the whole day along the coast with a sea as smooth as glass and no wind' (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.124). The boat with oars and a mast shown in pencil in the middle distance may be the boat to which Adam is referring. This drawing parallels in intimacy and immediacy Robert Adam's drawing of the view from his window at the Casa Guarnieri in Rome in Adam vol.57/151. After this drawing, there follow 17 blank album leaves.

Literature

A. A. Tait, 'An Adam Volume in Sir John Soane's Museum' in The Burlington Magazine129, November 1987, p.743A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, fig.11.Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, 1996, cat.3

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999
The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).