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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio of an octagonal pavilion with Venetian windows, on a rusticated and arcaded basement. It is approached from a raised walkway that has a rusticated balustrade on one side and circular, thatched and tiled buildings on the other side. The whole is set in a richly wooded landscape, with figures in a boat in the foreground.
  • image Adam vol.56/5
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/5

Purpose

Capriccio of an octagonal pavilion with Venetian windows, on a rusticated and arcaded basement. It is approached from a raised walkway that has a rusticated balustrade on one side and circular, thatched and tiled buildings on the other side. The whole is set in a richly wooded landscape, with figures in a boat in the foreground.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in red ink 5

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably early 1750s.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, watercolour, bodycolour560 x 385

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

crowned fleur de lys

Notes

There is a design of a similar octagonal pavilion with Venetian windows by James Adam dated 1755 in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pl.32), and another composition by Robert Adam in Adam vol.56/8. The assured hand here is that of Robert Adam; the landscape is typical of his watercolours of the early 1750s, and may be compared with his more accomplished Italian compositions of c.1756 (see Adam vol.56/49-54 and, particularly, the unfinished drawing in vol.56/158). There are several similar compositions by Adam in the Blair Adam collection, some dated 1752 (see BA 205 in particular).

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).