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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome: the Trevi Fountain. View of the Trevi Fountain showing the building from the left of the central standing figure of Oceanus, with the attic storey of the architectural façade behind cut off. In the foreground are groups of figures.
  • image Adam vol.56/55
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/55

Purpose

Italy: Rome: the Trevi Fountain. View of the Trevi Fountain showing the building from the left of the central standing figure of Oceanus, with the attic storey of the architectural façade behind cut off. In the foreground are groups of figures.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 6; in red ink 55

Signed and dated

  • Undated, but c.1755

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black and white chalks, watercolour and bodycolour, on grey paper415 x 570

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist

Watermark

circle with fleur de lys

Notes

This drawing is one of three views of the Trevi Fountain, originally numbered 4, 5 and 6 (see Adam vol.56/56 and 56/57). The fountain, by architect Nicola Salvi (d.1751)and sculptor Giovanni Battista Maini, was inaugurated in 1744, although unfinished, and is depicted in the view by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1695-1764) of 1744. Work was suspended during 1751 and 1758 and the fountain was only completed in 1762, after Robert Adam had left Rome (see Pinto The Trevi Fountain (London, 1986) for a full account of the history of the fountain). It seems likely that this drawing and Adam vol.56/56 and 56/57 were acquired from the same source as Laurent Pecheux's elevation of 1753 for Sir William Chambers (Harris & Snodin Sir William Chambers, Architect to George III (New Haven and London, 1997), see Soane Museum SM 22/2/8, illus. p.22), although the draughtsmanship here is very different in its liveliness and colour, and in the greater emphasis given to the sculpture over the architecture. Like Chambers, Robert Adam appears to have admired Salvi and regarded his work among '... what good buildings are in Rome ...' (see Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.359). The three views may well have been part of Adam's plan of 1755 '... to do the fountains ...' of Rome, using '... my own and our myrmidons' (Fleming 1962, p.152). He was also interested in, and drew, the aqueduct that fed Salvi's fountain (see Clerk Collection, Scotland, Clerk 106).

Literature

Rep. John A. Pinto The Trevi Fountain (London, 1986), fig.157

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).