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  • image Adam vol.56/110
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/110

Purpose

Capriccio showing a long rectangular vaulted tunnel with rounded arcading on each side; at one end are rocks and a waterfall, and at the other end are inscribed panels and column bases.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 71; in red ink on album leaf and on drawing 110

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably between 1755 and 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey and brown washes264 x 352, sheet is collaged from 3 pieces of paper; bottom corners both torn

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This drawing may be based on the tunnel halls that Robert Adam saw around Baia and the Lago d'Averno in 1755 during his Naples tour (see Adam volume 57, in particular 57/9), or on an interior such as the nymphaeum at Castel Gandolfo, of which there is a drawing by Charles-Louis Clérisseau in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (see McCormick Charles-Louis Clérisseau and the Genesis of Neo-Classicism (Cambridge, Massuchusetts and London, 1990), pl.136). There is a copy of this drawing by C J Richardson (1806-1871) in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (P&D 93.G.8/25). The original version of this composition, which is smaller and in greater detail, is in the Clérisseau collection in The Hermitage, St Petersburg (2559).The numeral 71 suggests that this drawing has been mounted out of sequence.

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).