The Virgin and Child beneath a baldachin, with Saints Agnes, Dorothea and Irene

This oversize drawing, probably made as an independent work of art demonstrating the artist’s purity of style and great technical skill, dates from the years when Müller, who studied in Munich with Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Peter von Cornelius, established himself in Düsseldorf after a stay in Rome. A few years later, in 1855, he was appointed professor at Düsseldorf’s leading art academy, where his brother Carl would soon also become a professor, and eventually its director. In these years, he worked with Carl and other artists on the decoration of the Neogothic Apollinariskirche in Remagen on the Rhine, one of the major achievements of the Nazarene movement.