In the eighteenth century the southern German city of Augsburg witnessed the flowering of a uniquely German expression of the irrational in architecture, painting and prints. One of the proponents of the so-called Augsburg Rococo, Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner incorporated its flourishes even in moralizing religious subjects such as this scene of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

Baumgartner's birthplace of 1709 is undocumented but is thought to be Kufstein in the Tyrol. His origins were humble, his first training being as a blacksmith, probably under his father. Apprenticed in Salzburg, he trained as a Hinterglasmaler, a painter of decorative scenes on the reverse of glass panels. His Wanderjahr was spent in Austrian lands, including Bohemia and Hungary, and a reference to "Welschland" may refer to time in Italy otherwise undocumented.(1) In 1733 he settled in Augsburg with his wife, attaining full citizenship and guild membership only in 1746. He began to receive commissions for major frescoes and altarpieces only in later years, with works in the Wallfahrtskirche Heilige Kreuz in Bergen near Neuberg in 1757–58 and frescoes of the twelve months in the garden pavilion of the Prince-Bishop of Constance at the Neue Residenz in Meersberg.

Baumgartner was a friend of many Augsburg artists, especially those around the academy. He may well have known Johann Georg Bergmüller, also represented in this exhibition, and had as pupils Gottfried Bernhard Götz and Johann Evangelist Holzer.

The preponderance of Baumgartner's surviving works are drawings, which served for devotional prints, Thesenblätter (prints made on the occasion of a completed academic degree), calendars, narrative series and book illustrations. Unusually, and logically for a Hinterglasmaler used to working in reverse, some of his preparatory works for prints were done in oils. Perhaps because of his early work as a blacksmith, he was especially attuned to ornament and rocaille, which came to dominate his fictive spaces and style.

In the Crocker drawing, Baumgartner divides the space between a loggia where the rich man holds his banquet and the mound in the foreground at left where Lazarus sits begging, dogs licking his sores in accordance with the Biblical passage (Luke 16: 19-31). The situation will be reversed after their deaths, Lazarus taken to Abraham's bosom and the rich man tortured instead. Baumgartner employs his most elaborate style for the rich man's palace, with a swooping balustrade at left where silver riches are displayed, graceful, curving parapets and stairs, and a billowing curtain above the rich man's throne. A drawing of Christ in the House of the Tax Collector now in Frankfurt(2) demonstrates the artist's facility with figures, their gestures and rhythms, while the architecture, showing awareness of Venetian models, is more restrained. The same rhythm of gesture is present in the Crocker Lazarus, which moreover shows beggar and rich man framing the composition in echoing poses, their heads emphasized by the empty fields of Baroque ornaments behind them. Such narrative clarity is especially appropriate for religious prints and, in fact, the verso of the Crocker drawing is dusted for transfer with red chalk.

Long known as the work of Januarius Zick, the name under which it entered the collection, the Crocker drawing was first attributed to Baumgartner by Bruno Bushart in 1976, an opinion confirmed by Thomas Le Claire in 1992.(3) Though no print depicting the Crocker composition has yet been found, it seems best to date it in the 1740s, when Baumgartner was occupied with religious illustration, including the plainer Engelbrechtschen Bibelfolgen of 1743, to which Baumgartner contributed drawings.(4)