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  • image Adam vol.56/63
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/63

Purpose

Capriccio showing figures beside a sarcophagus, a column and ruined decorated panels in a landscape setting with trees and vegetation. In the distance are battlemented towers and walls.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

In ink 6; and on both album leaf and drawing in red ink 63

Signed and dated

  • Datable to probably 1756

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black chalk, pen and grey washes (262 x 379), all four corners trimmed diagonally; the sheet has been folded vertically in the centre

Hand

Robert Adam (1728-1792)

Verso

Pen outline of a female figure holding an urn under her arm.

Notes

There are several similar pen and wash studies in volume 56, such as Adam vol.56/65, which differ from the landscape garden compositions (of which vol.56/41 is typical). They show the influence of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803) more strongly in their emphasis on the ruin and its setting, which in this case derived from the Aurelian walls of Rome. The composition of many of these studies can be compared with the smaller and more freely drawn pen and ink sketches in volume 55 (see particularly Adam vol.55/98-110). The trimmed corners suggest that they were originally in another album and the disjointed numbering suggests that they have been rearranged (see Adam vol.56/94-97).

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).