Inscribed
Inscribed in ink 86; in red ink on backing sheet 53
Signed and dated
- Undated, probably c.1756.
Medium and dimensions
Pencil and pen; grey wash on grey washed paper265 x 423, mounted on backing sheet 318 x 429
Hand
Robert Adam
Verso
On the verso of the backing sheet are the remains of corners of a drawing on grey paper (see also Adam vol.56/50).
Notes
The drawings in Adam vol.56/49-54 are part of a set of landscape compositions by Robert Adam. They are all of a similar size, on grey washed paper and in the style of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803), but sources of the compositions may differ. It is likely that these drawings were part of a larger group since each has a number between 83 and 94, inscribed in the eighteenth century. They were probably made in Rome in c.1756; Robert Adam wrote in November of that year that he had been working on such 'kind of ... sketches...' and had '... already made out a dozen different views as unlike one another as I could ...' (Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.363). This set of drawings may be compared with the landscape compositions in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (for example 1954-14) (see Tait Robert Adam: drawings and imagination (Cambridge, 1993), pp.20-23).The circular building in this drawing can be compared to that in the small landscape sketch on the verso of Adam vol.55/51.
Level
Drawing
Exhibition history
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
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).