Augustin Meinrad Bächtiger
Born in 1888.
Died in Gossau (Switzerland) in 1971.
Swiss · Munich academic training, with connections to Jugendstil and late nineteenth-century German painting · figurative painting and monumental sacred decoration.
Augustin Meinrad Bächtiger was part of the artistic life of eastern Switzerland in the early twentieth century. After attending the vocational school in St Gallen and training in decorative painting, he continued his studies at the Munich Academy and Wilhelm von Debschitz’s teaching workshop. His teachers included Peter Halm, Angelo Jank and Franz von Stuck.
This education introduced him to academic traditions, Jugendstil and late nineteenth-century German painting.
Early in his career, he worked as a painter, graphic artist and illustrator. In 1912 he won the poster competition for the Federal Singing Festival in Neuchâtel; the following year, his design for the Swiss National Day postcard also received an award. In 1914 he exhibited at the graphic art exhibition in Leipzig and the Swiss National Exhibition in Bern.
These early achievements show the importance of printed imagery in his training and recognition.
Military service in Graubünden introduced him to the landscapes of the Engadine. After the war he lived and worked in Samedan before undertaking a study trip to France and Spain. Museums, cathedrals and Mediterranean landscapes broadened his repertoire.
He developed a visual language encompassing landscape painting, the human figure and monumental decoration.
Bächtiger settled in Gossau in 1923 and lived and worked there until 1971. In 1924 he became a founding member of the German-speaking Swiss section of the Catholic artists’ association Societas Sancti Lucae. Church painting became a major strand of his activity without displacing easel paintings, watercolours and graphic work.
The Weltgericht, or Last Judgement, on the ceiling of the Andreaskirche in Gossau is an emblematic example of his monumental painting. Its composition confronts viewers with intense religious imagery. In 1943 Bächtiger also painted a mural for the chapter hall of the Professorenheim at the Benedictine college in Sarnen.
Preserved in their architectural settings, these works illuminate a practice conceived in relation to the scale and uses of the building.
His presence in public collections is precisely documented. The inventory of the Swiss Federal Art Collections published in 2021 lists Auszug der Helvetier, made before 1946, as SWB3, alongside four paintings titled Soldatenlied, dated 1937, under W2765 to W2768. Their listed location is the Collections Centre in Bern.
These records provide concrete points of reference for studying his work beyond religious commissions.
His artistic estate has been under scholarly care since 1998 and has formed part of the Bächtiger-Archiv since 2014. Works, designs, correspondence, photographs and biographical documents are preserved and studied there. Beata Ebnöther’s articles in the Toggenburger Jahrbuch of 2008 and 2013, together with the 1988 monograph by Isabella Studer-Geisser and Daniel Studer, provide important resources for studying his career and sacred painting.
His landscapes are also documented on the auction market. Schuler catalogued Im Panixertal, Rotstock, a signed oil on canvas measuring 40.5 × 52 cm, in March and again in June 2018. Both entries give the same title, dimensions and description.
They must not be treated as two distinct paintings or two confirmed auction sales.
