An elegant, masked Couple drinking Coffee

This fine watercolour provides an intriguing insight into Giuseppe Bernardino Bison’s working method. The servant at the center of the composition is a sort of pentimento added later by the artist. The figure is drawn on a separate sheet of paper that Bison inserted into the composition, after carefully cutting into the original drawing. The artist employed the same method of altering or correcting a preliminary idea in other drawings such as a watercolour of A peasant family loading a donkey (Sotheby’s, London, 5 July 2017, lot 45).

The present work was at one time in the remarkable collection assembled by the Anglo-Austrian art historian and collector Count Antoine Seilern (1901-1978), who purchased it from Colnaghi’s in 1951. Seilern began buying paintings and drawings in the 1930s, eventually amassing a superb collection, which included drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, Bruegel, Della Bella, Guardi, Michelangelo, Parmigianino, Rembrandt, Rubens, Giambattista and Tiepolo and many more. At his death, the bulk of Seilern’s collection was bequeathed anonymously, as the ‘Princes Gate Bequest’, to the Courtauld Gallery in London. Although Seilern owned at least three other drawings by Bison, the present sheet does not appear in the privately-printed catalogue of the Italian paintings and drawings in his collection, first published in 1959, and may have been out of his possession by that time.