Works by Robert Adam

Robert Adam, the Scottish neoclassical architect, drew far more than plans: next to his designs for a staircase and a chimneypiece are wash drawings of imagined classical ruins and of castles above rivers.

As a young man he wanted to be an artist rather than an architect, and his early sketches take their manner from Salvator Rosa. In Rome, where he stayed until 1757, he studied ancient buildings and worked at his drawing under Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Classical Landscape with Ruins, dated 1755–57, crowds ruined colonnades and a pyramid into one view of quick pen lines under grey wash.

From 1758 he worked in London with his brother James, designing whole interiors down to the carpets and door handles. For Headfort House in Ireland he drew a chimneypiece for the eating parlour, signed and dated 1771: a roundel above the fireplace holds three dancing women beside a bust on a pillar, under a pediment and between fluted columns. A section of the staircase shows one wall floor by floor, with its doors, railing and plaster panels, the shadows washed in grey.

Several imaginary views dated 1776–77 are drawn in pen, black ink and grey wash with touches of white, on paper squared in pencil. In Architectural fantasy with an antique bridge over a river the bridge runs from a ruined arch at left past a roofed tower house at right, and a boat is poled under its span. Castles over rivers return in later sheets like River Landscape with a Castle, from the 1780s, tinted pink and blue, with a boatload of people at the front.

Sources: Wikipedia, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale Center for British Art, Art Institute of Chicago. Portrait: Attributed to George Willison.