One of the relatively few watercolors in the Crocker collection, this drawing by the painter Johann Georg Bergmüller proposes a visually arresting solution to the challenge of a multi-figured altarpiece. Perhaps a contract drawing, its tumbling diagonals and unifying color align each of the gracefully-handled saints in a clear narrative, seen here before changes likely requested by the altarpiece's patron.

Bergmüller was born in 1688 in the town of Türkheim, a seat of the Bavarian Wittelsbach court. Though he surely learned the rudiments of art from his father, a cabinetmaker and sculptor, he was noticed by Duke Maximilian Philipp, who sponsored his study in Munich under Johann Andreas Wolff beginning in 1702. By 1708, the nineteen-year-old Bergmüller received his first commission from another member of the Wittelsbach family, Prince Johann Wilhelm of the Palatinate, moving to his court in Düsseldorf to complete frescoes for the church of Saint Hubert, now destroyed. Three years later, the Wittelsbachs sponsored another trip, this time to the Netherlands "mehrers perfection ieben [sic],"(1) to perfect his art. Settling in Augsburg in 1713, the artist found a niche as history painter, becoming the leader of the painters' guild in 1722, the Catholic director of the city's painting academy in 1730, and court painter in 1739. His many frescoes in Augsburg—for the Cathedral, the churches of Heilig-Kreuz and Saint Anne, and the Bishop's Palace—are mainly destroyed, though churches in Diessen, Ochsenhausen, Steingaden and other surrounding towns preserve them. Bergmüller's altarpieces are scattered more widely throughout southern Germany, from Konstanz to Biberach to Dillingen. He worked also as a printmaker, especially of thesis prints (prints made on the occasion of an academic degree). He died in 1762.

Evidence is scant that Bergmüller ever went to Italy. Rather, his Italianate clarity of composition and skill in handling the human form must derive from his training under Wolff, his study of prints and later, the pressures of keeping up with advances in art as the director of an academy ideally situated between North and South. He wrote a treatise on the human figure as early as 1723.(2)

This skill in handling the figure and its expression in large compositions is in ample evidence in the Crocker drawing. The main episode of Saint Martin at left appealing to the Virgin above is in no way disturbed by the activities of the other saints, Michael at right casting out a demon, Mary Magdalen kissing the foot of the Christ Child, and Saints George and Catherine(?) adoring the Child from left and right. A bolt of lightning departs from Saint Michael's hand to divide the scene in halves, travelling down to the earthly realm shared by the hell-bound demon above and the beggar who gratefully receives Martin's cloak below. At the pinnacle of the composition and not visible in reproduction, the figure of God watches over all.

The Crocker drawing dates from 1715, in the early years of Bergmüller's maturity. The hand and spelling of the inscription is shared by a second drawing of Saint Martin now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.(3) The similarity of subject once created some confusion since the Crocker drawing is conected with neither this drawing nor the related altarpiece of 1712 in the town of Merching, but rather with the altarpiece completed in 1716 for the church of Tannheim, as discovered by Alois Epple in 1990.(4)

The altarpiece, likely because of changes requested by the patron, loses some of the drawing's narrative clarity. The squawking goose who has given away Saint Martin's hiding-place intrudes at left, while the former grace of the lower-right quadrant is disturbed by the reversed position of Saint Martin's hands, the illogical presence of a socle or altar, and the melodrama created both by Saint Michael's lightning-bolt tracing his motto "Quis ut deus" formerly on his shield and by the flaming mouth of Hell. According to Epple, an early restorer, reparing the altarpiece to obviate moisture damage may have changed some of the latter areas.(5)

Like many drawings in the Crocker collection, this one belonged to the noble Prussian general, art historian and collector Freiherr Carl Rolas du Rosey, whose death sale took place in 1864, only six years before the drawing entered the Museum. It is part of a larger group from the stock of Rudolf Weigel, a member of a longstanding family of dealers in Leipzig.(6)

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