One of Franz Schüz's most engaging landscapes, the Crocker View of the Münster Valley depicts a mountain pass in a vertical format, unusual for the artist. Dated 1780, it was completed the year before the artist's death.

The short-lived Schüz was born in 1751 in Frankfurt am Main. He was the son of Christian Georg Schütz the Elder, also a painter, from whom he received his early training. Little is recorded of his activities until the age of twenty-six, when he met Gideon Burckhard, a merchant and patron living in Basle. Schüz became the merchant's protégé, accompanying him on a long trip through the canton of Uri, Lugano and the lake country of northern Italy, and Milan in 1777–78. Drawings record many of the views the two encountered, including the Saint Gotthard Pass and the Isole Borromee on the Lago Maggiore.(1) Still enjoying Burckhard's support, in 1780 the artist moved to Geneva, where he died of tuberculosis the next year.

Only a very few oil paintings survive by Schüz. Though he provided designs for etchers as well, his main output was landscape drawings. The Crocker drawing shows well the artist's skill in manipulating black and white chalk, especially in the distant mountains and sky, where delicate transitions between the two are very effective in depicting cloud formations. Relying very little on graphic shorthand, Schüz captures the different textures of vegetation, rock and water. As often in his drawings, he includes a fisherman and child in the left foreground to enable the eye to comprehend the scale of the scene beyond.

In addition to recording the artist and date, the inscription at center of the lower margin indicates that the drawing was planned as a finished work of art, as it seems many of Schüz's drawings were, and as a gift. It is unfortunate that the artist does not indicate which friend he dedicates the drawing to, though it is perhaps Burckhard himself. At right, the phrase "gezeichnet in Genf" tells us that it was created in Geneva where artist and patron had moved earlier in the year. This raises the question of whether the drawing was created on the basis of sketches no longer extant. Whether or not such sketches existed, the arrangement of bridge, mountains and stream seems calculated to create a coherent, visually pleasing whole, while the foreground tree at left and the bushes at right are planned to frame the view and draw the eye into the distance.

The inscription "gegend aus dem Münsterthal" at left identifies the view, though rather deceptively as there are many valleys known by this German name. One is in the Tirol, at the opposite end of Switzerland from Geneva and well beyond the canton of Uri, the town of Lugano and the route to Milan that the artist is recorded as having taken in 1777–78. A more likely place for the view's origin, especially given the relatively low mountains, is the Münsterthal or Val de Munster on the Fecht river in Alsace, not far from Geneva where the drawing was made. To this writer, the fact that few if any drawing by Schüz survive that can be documented as scenes east of Canton Uri is persuasive.

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