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  • image Adam vol.56/69
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/69

Purpose

Capriccio showing columns and entablature of a ruined portico, with a statue of a seated figure on a rectangular base with an urn in the shape of a pine-cone; in the foreground are architectural fragments.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

In red ink 69

Signed and dated

  • Datable to probably between 1755 and 1757

Medium and dimensions

Pen and watercolour; double framing lines, with paper outside framing lines washed to pale grey colourdrawing within a circle of 100 dia., sheet size 112 x 110, trimmed to form an octagon

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau (attributed to)

Notes

The portico, statue and large urn in this drawing are all familiar elements in this series of circular compositions (see Adam vol.56/66). The composition can be compared with the larger drawing by Clérisseau in Adam vol.56/96, and the more competent handling of the figures certainly suggests it is by Clérisseau rather than Robert Adam.

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).