Heinrich Karl Anton Mücke (9 April 1806 - 16 January 1891) was a prominent Realist painter known for his

liturgical Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. ''Liturgy'' can also be used to refer specifically to public worship by Christians. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and partic ...

and

genre Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other for ...

paintings as well as frescoes, which still adorn some of Germany's ancient castles and cathedrals. His paintings are hung today in Germany's leading museums, including the

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director ...

Berlin, Breslau Museum and the Brunn Museum. His son, Karl Mücke, was also a recognized genre painter. Heinrich Mücke was a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy and received the Portuguese Medal for Art and Sciences as well as the Breslau Medal. He is associated with the

Düsseldorf school of painting The Düsseldorf school of painting is a term referring to a group of painters who taught or studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Academy (now the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf or Düsseldorf State ...

Early life and travels

Heinrich Mücke was born in Breslau, then in

Prussia Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an ...

and today in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

, in the spring of 1806. He received formal training in art at both the Berlin Academy and the

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian language, Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second- ...

Academy. Mücke worked under the well established painter

Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow (7 September 1789 – 19 March 1862) was a German Romantic painter. Biography He was born in Berlin, the second son of the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, who gave him his first lessons in drawing. He then turne ...

. Travel was an important element of life to Mücke, Italy being his first extended foreign sojourn over the winter of 1834–35. Later, in the year 1850 he visited England, while he vacationed in Switzerland many times. From earliest predilections, he chose historical religious subjects, especially those containing dramatic or exalted themes.

Liturgical paintings

Biblical topics were the first for which Mücke was well known. In the core of his early painting career he completed such works as: '' Saint Catherine carried by Angels to

Mount Sinai Mount Sinai ( he , הר סיני ''Har Sinai''; Aramaic: ܛܘܪܐ ܕܣܝܢܝ ''Ṭūrāʾ Dsyny''), traditionally known as Jabal Musa ( ar, جَبَل مُوسَىٰ, translation: Mount Moses), is a mountain on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. It is ...

(1836)''; '' Saint Ambrose and

Emperor Theodosius Theodosius I ( grc-gre, Θεοδόσιος ; 11 January 347 – 17 January 395), also called Theodosius the Great, was Roman emperor from 379 to 395. During his reign, he succeeded in a crucial war against the Goths, as well as in two ...

'' (1838); '' Saint Elizabeth taking Farewell of her Husband'' (1841); ''Saint Elizabeth Giving Alms'' (1841), the last of which pieces is hung in the

Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. Further

oils of the late 1840s,early 1850s and undated works are: ''

Coronation A coronation is the act of placement or bestowal of a crown upon a monarch's head. The term also generally refers not only to the physical crowning but to the whole ceremony wherein the act of crowning occurs, along with the presentation of ot ...

of the

Virgin Virginity is the state of a person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse. The term ''virgin'' originally only referred to sexually inexperienced women, but has evolved to encompass a range of definitions, as found in traditional, modern ...

'' (1847); '' Saint Adelbert'' (1851); ''Cycle of Life of Saint Meinrad''; ''

Good Shepherd The Good Shepherd ( el, ποιμὴν ὁ καλός, ''poimḗn ho kalós'') is an image used in the pericope of , in which Jesus Christ is depicted as the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. Similar imagery is used in Psalm 23 ...

''; and ''Christ

Crucified Crucifixion is a method of capital punishment in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross or beam and left to hang until eventual death from exhaustion and asphyxiation. It was used as a punishment by the Persians, Carthagin ...

''.

Paintings of noble life, genre scenes and portraiture

Heinrich Mücke also attended to other subject matter, especially while in his early forties. He enjoyed portraying famous historic people in foreign lands, such as ''

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian people, Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', origin ...

Verona Verona ( , ; vec, Verona or ) is a city on the Adige River in Veneto, Italy, with 258,031 inhabitants. It is one of the seven provincial capitals of the region. It is the largest city municipality in the region and the second largest in nor ...

'' (1846) and '' Cleopatra Dying'' (1873). The well known ''Male Portrait'' (1861) hangs in the Düsseldorf Museum. Finally to note his genre work, one can turn to his painting ''Mother and Child'' (ca. 1850); the latter work was destroyed by wildfire in 2017 from the collection of C. Michael Hogan.

The frescoes

Not content with liturgical art on canvas, Mücke relished the creation of expansive frescoes in some of the superb old buildings in Germany. The earliest well-known example is a series of many large images produced over a nine-year period at Castle Heltorf near

: ''Scenes from life of Barbarossa'' (1829–1938). In general Mücke's frescoes comprised early compositions, although these works were clearly interleaved in time with his liturgical oil paintings.

Karl Mücke, Heinrich's son

Karl Mücke was born in 1847 and surely studied under his father. Karl became a distinguished painter in his own right, although not as renowned as his father. He specialized in

painting and is recognized for such works as ''Little Brother'', ''Sunday Afternoon'', ''Mother's Joy'', ''Paternal Joys'' and ''Mending Nets on the Coast of Holland''. Karl died on 27 May 1923.

Permanent collections

* Breslau Museum * Brunn Museum * Chemnitz Museum *

Museum *

Berlin

Bibliography

* '' Cyclopedia of Painters'', Vol. 3, ed. by John Denison Champlin, Empire State Book Co. (1927) * E. Benézit, '' Dictionnaire de Peinteurs, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs'', 1st ed. 1911, revised 1976 * Michael Bryan, ''Bryan's Dictionary of Painters'', C. Bell and Sons, London (1927) * Wiegmann, p118 {{DEFAULTSORT:Mucke, Heinrich 19th-century German painters 19th-century German male artists Düsseldorf school of painting German male painters German genre painters Realist painters 1806 births 1891 deaths Artists from Wrocław People from the Province of Silesia Prussian Academy of Arts alumni