Born in the Friulian town of Palmanova in 1762, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison was one of the most accomplished decorative painters of the turn of the nineteenth century, creating theater set designs and palace frescoes across north-eastern Italy. He studied first in Brescia, then moved at the age of fifteen to Venice, where he met the painter Antonio Maria Zanetti the Younger. Zanetti perhaps eased his admission into the city's Accademia in 1779, where he remained ten years. Friendships among architects led to his work for theaters in Venice, Treviso, Trento and Gorizia. At the same time, specific commissions, like that for the Obizzi family in 1790, allowed him to apply his skills to private dwellings. Though he was based in Trieste in the years around 1800, the wanderings of his middle years brought him as far afield as Udine in Friuli and Zara in Dalmatia. In 1831 he settled permanently in Milan, where he took part in exhibitions at the Brera, until his death in 1844.

Bison's engaging and imaginative style drew upon the legacy of the great Venetian painters, though he concentrated not on weighty subject matter but rather their shimmering, graceful technique. Here, the artists creates a vision assembled from a variety of architectural elements, with pyramids, temples, equestrian monuments and columned porches arranged along a meadow. Bison's use of watercolor and wash captures well the humid heat and languor of the Veneto midday.

Imaginary buildings and landscapes were of course important in the repertoire of an artist who designed stage sets, but Bison's composition is not necessarily theatrical. A prolific, nervous draughtsman, the artist created many such landscapes as independent works of art, whether for personal pleasure or, certainly in the case of his many drawings in tempera on cardboard, for sale. The pure pleasure of creation may have motivated him here as elsewhere.

A recent purchase, the Crocker drawing is very much in the spirit of the artist's views of monuments, sharing details in plant forms as well as the brilliant pen- and brushwork.(1) A second, figural motif occupies the verso, its dynamic, gestural pen over graphite in keeping with known drawings.(2) The signature at lower right recto may indicate intent to sell.

It is possible that the scene depicts a view in the real world. Each of the architectural forms we see—pyramid, monument, and temple—was used for mausoleums, the pyramid most memorably for Canova's recently-completed monument to the Archduchess Maria Christina in Vienna. The columned portico at center is reminiscent of tombs in Venice and the Veneto. Such a jumble of styles and periods in monuments enclosed by a wall with cypresses beyond is typical of cemeteries especially in north-eastern Italy.

William Breazeale, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010