Scotland: Moray: Elgin Cathedral. View of the ruins of Elgin Cathedral seen from across the River Lossie. In the foreground are several figures, one fishing, and a horse added in pencil.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 56

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Reference number

Adam vol.56/3

Purpose

Scotland: Moray: Elgin Cathedral. View of the ruins of Elgin Cathedral seen from across the River Lossie. In the foreground are several figures, one fishing, and a horse added in pencil.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Lettered in pencil ELGIN; inscribed in red ink 3

Signed and dated

Undated, probably between 1746 and 1750.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey wash240 x 382

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

countermark

Notes

This is a copy by Robert Adam of a drawing by Paul Sandby of c.1746, now in the National Galleries of Scotland (D67). Apart from lacking the quality of the original, Adam's drawing differs from that of Sandby in the two figures and horse in the foreground. (For the relationship between Sandby and the Adam family at this time, see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, pp.11-15.) Drawings in Adam vol.56/27 and 56/28 are attributed to Sandby and probably belong to this Scottish period. The unfinished pencil inscription, ELGIN, in large letters at the top of the sheet suggests that this drawing was intended for engraving.

Literature

Rep. A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, fig.9

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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