Hans Bocksberger the Elder

This unusual and impressive landscape, with its extensive use of watercolour and gouache, has recently been identified as the work of the rare and idiosyncratic Salzburg artist, Hans Bocksberger the Elder, whose wall paintings and canvases were in great demand with leading patrons in Salzburg, Landshut, Innsbruck and Munich, in the middle years of the 16^th century. 

The drawing is on two sheets of paper: the primary support has been cut in several places and reassembled onto a second sheet of paper. As is clear from their watermarks and the composition, both sheets date from the sixteenth century.

The watermark of the original sheet shows the coat-of-arms of the city of Schrobenhausen. It corresponds with Bricquet nrs. 2231-2239, watermarks widely found in Southern Germany from the 1530s onwards. Schrobenhausen is located near Neuburg a.d. Donau, where Bocksberger was working in 1543 on the decoration of the Schlosskappelle, and is also close to Landshut, where Bocksberger painted frescoes for the Stadtresidenz one year earlier, in 1542. These frescoes in Landshut include landscapes and hunting scenes similar to those depicted in the present drawing, which most likely dates from the same period, circa 1542-3.

The watermark of the backing sheet corresponds with Bricquet 1245 and 1246, both of which are recorded in a wide area of German-speaking territories in the final quarter of the 16th century, suggesting that during the couple of decades after the artist's death the drawing did not stray all that far from where it was made. Perhaps it remained in the studio of a family member (Bocksberger’s son, Hans Bocksberger the Younger, and cousin Melchior Bocksberger, were both artists who died in the 1580s). In any case, after being laid down, it seems to have been sold. On the reverse of the mounting paper there is a red chalk inscription, in what Dr. Christof Metzger has confirmed is sixteenth-century handwriting, recording what must have been a price: 1fl5 (one florin and 5 cents).

Dr. Hans-Martin Kaulbach, having studied the drawing in the original, has kindly confirmed the attribution, and this is therefore an important addition to the very small body of known works by this accomplished and intriguing mid-16^th century artist.