Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Unfinished capriccio showing a river crossed by a three-bay bridge with classical ruins on several levels on one side, and domestic buildings on the other side. In the foreground are a shepherd and sheep, together with other unfinished figures and horses.
  • image Adam vol.56/6
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.56/6

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing a river crossed by a three-bay bridge with classical ruins on several levels on one side, and domestic buildings on the other side. In the foreground are a shepherd and sheep, together with other unfinished figures and horses.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil al luzientam saefer/ Hdd gacers?; in red ink 6

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably between 1745 and 1750.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil; pencil framing line282 x 405

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This drawing by Robert Adam is probably a copy or a variation on a seventeenth-century Dutch print in the collection in the library at Blair Adam. In the Adam sale of 1818 (Catalogue of A Valuable Collection of Antique Sculpture etc. R. Adam, Christie's, London, 21 and 22 May 1818) there was a substantial number of lots of this sort (see lots 51-63 in D. Watkin, ed., Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, Vol. 4, Architects, London, 1972, pp.142-49). Like his exact contemporary and brother-in-law John Clerk, Robert Adam used prints by Herman van Swanevelt, Anton Waterlo, Zeeman and Franz Edmund Weirotter as source material. It is unlikely that the scene here is topographical, although the classical columns and architrave appear antique.

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).