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  • image Adam vol.56/142
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/142

Purpose

Capriccio showing the interior of a series of halls at different levels, with coffered barrel vaults and dome supported by free-standing columns topped with sculpture and separated by niches.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 106; in red ink on album leaf and on drawing 142

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1756 or 1757.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey and brown washes; ink framing line294 x 351, 4 corners trimmed diagonally

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This drawing is a companion to Adam vol.56/132 and 56/138, and like them shows the reconstruction of an antique interior. It is perhaps closer to Adam vol.56/145 in the depiction of the wall below the vault and the character of the niches; it can also be related to pen sketches in Adam volume 55 (see in particular, Adam vol.55/81). There is a smaller version of this composition with a figure, probably by Robert Adam, in The Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia (2553).

Literature

Rep. Salmon Building on Ruins; The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture (London, 2000), pl.VI

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).