Giuseppe Bernardino Bison

Private collector, United Kingdom;

With Cesare Lampronti, Rome, by 2014;

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 26 January 2017, lot 291;

Where acquired by the present collector.

The last great Venetian view painter, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison followed in the footsteps of Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Luca Carlevarijs, and Michele Marieschi and adapted the tradition of Venetian vedutismo, or view painting, for late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century collectors. Based on works by Canaletto, the pair depicts two of the most recognizable Venetian views.¹ One illustrates the Molo, the wharf to the west of the Doge's Palace; the other the Grand Canal leading back to the Rialto Bridge.

Both compositions depict civic festivals. The view of the Molo features the Bucintoro, the Doge's elaborate barge from which he performed the Sposalizio del Mar, or Wedding to the Sea, a ceremony held annually on Ascension Day that symbolically marked the union of the city of Venice and the sea. The sweeping view of the Grand Canal features a regatta and commemorates the visit of Frederick IV, King of Denmark and Norway, to Venice in 1709.

¹ Windsor Castle, Royal Collection Trust, inv. nos. RCIN 404416 and RCIN 404417. They are among the twelve views of the Grand Canal once in the collection of Joseph Smith that Visentini engraved in 1735 for his Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum.