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  • image Adam vol.56/158
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/158

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing domed building in partially wooded landscape. In the foreground is a ruin constructed from fragments, with three figures on the steps and a dog.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in red ink in 2 places on the drawing 158.

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably c.1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, chalk, watercolour; chalk framing line368 x 527

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

IHS

Notes

This drawing is similar to the landscape studies by Robert Adam in the sketchbook in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see Tait Robert Adam: drawings and imagination (Cambridge, 1993), pp.21-23). It can also be compared with drawings in Adam vol.56/49-54 that show the influence of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803) on Adam and reflect his interest in the landscaped park (see Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.363). Like these other drawings, this composition can probably be dated c.1756; it shows how far Adam had progressed from the landscape compositions he had made earlier in the decade (see Adam vol.56/5).

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).