Design for an interior with a staircase

This gleaming design for a wall decoration is an entirely distinctive work by the painter and designer Bernardino Bison. The sheet belongs to the artist’s early maturity, when he was inspired by a new classicism and formal restraint. The all’antica decorative inset appears in a similar watercolor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 67.707.1; M.L. Meyers, Architectural and Ornamental Drawings, New York 1975, no. 18, ill.) and relates closely to some motifs frescoed by Bison on the first floor of Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati alle Zattere, Venice (1793).