Giuseppe Bernardino Bison

With Antichità Caiati, Milan, by February 1998;

With De Jonckheere, Paris;

Where acquired by the present owners in 2004.

The last great Venetian view painter, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison followed in the footsteps of Luca Carlevarijs (1663–1730), Canaletto (1697–1768), Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780) and Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), but adapted the tradition of Venetian vedutismo for late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century collectors. As with other pictures of this type, Bison based the present composition on a work by Canaletto, which today hangs in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris,¹ but modified some of the details, such as the positioning of the boatmen in the foreground. Bison likely encountered this compositional design by way of the related print by Antonio Visentini (1688–1782), which was published in Giovanni Battista Pasquali's Urbis Venetiarum Prospectus Celebriores of 1742.²

¹ Inv. no. 10; oil on canvas, 45 x 76 cm. W.G. Constable, revised by J.G. Links, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), Oxford 1976, vol. II, p. 296, no. 228 (a).

² One edition of this album of prints is today in the British Museum, London: museum no. 1948,1117.1.1-43; etching, each sheet approximately 36 x 51 cm.; https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1948-1117-1-1-43.