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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Capriccio showing a half-elevation of a domed building with five-bay portico of the Gigantic Order on rusticated basement, with a flanking wing of two stories on a similar basement. Beyond is a five-bay shallow domed pavilion with columns on a rusticated basement.
  • image Adam vol.55/5

Reference number

Adam vol.55/5

Purpose

Capriccio showing a half-elevation of a domed building with five-bay portico of the Gigantic Order on rusticated basement, with a flanking wing of two stories on a similar basement. Beyond is a five-bay shallow domed pavilion with columns on a rusticated basement.

Aspect

Perspectiveverso, plan, elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 5

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen109 x 187

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pen outline diagrams in plan and elevation of a group of military fortifications and buildings. The plan may be associated with Robert Adam's work at Fort George, Inverness, Scotland, undertaken after 1748 and before he left for Italy in 1755. There is a version of this plan at Blair Adam (BA 621) (see C. McKean, The Architecture of Robert Adam, Life, Death and Survival, 1992, p.7) and in another scheme on the verso of Adam vol.9/56.

Notes

This half-elevation is similar in composition to several of the academic studies found in Adam volume 9, for example Adam vol.9/1verso and 9/5, and to the large scheme in Adam vol.55/164. The strongly Palladian character of the design is similar to Robert Adam's later schemes for a Parliament building, for which there is a perspective in Adam vol.1/28. The drawing on the verso of this sheet illustrates Adam's occasional habit of re-using paper.

Level

Drawing

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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.

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