Catharina Elisabeth Heinecken (1683 – November 5, 1757) was a German artist and alchemist and the mother of a celebrated child prodigy, Christian Heinrich Heineken.

Family

Born in

Lübeck Lübeck (; or ; Latin: ), officially the Hanseatic League, Hanseatic City of Lübeck (), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 220,000 inhabitants, it is the second-largest city on the German Baltic Sea, Baltic coast and the second-larg ...

, she was the daughter of painter and the stepdaughter of another painter, . She married the painter and architect

Paul Heinecken Paul Heinecken or Heineken (9 December 1674, Riga - 1746, Lübeck) Alken Bruns: "Heineken, Paul", In: ''Lübecker Lebensläufe aus neun Jahrhunderten'', Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1993 was a German painter, architect, and graphic artist. He enjoyed ...

, and they had two children: Carl Heinrich von Heineken, an art historian and collector who was later knighted, and Christian Heinrich Heineken, a child prodigy known as "the infant scholar of Lübeck" who only lived to be four years old. Heinecken painted portraits and

still lifes A still life (: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, ...

with flowers and fruit, and she made crowns and wreaths, which she rented to wedding parties. Her portrait of her son Christian Heinrich served as the template for an engraving by that was disseminated widely. It is said that she was deeply interested in

alchemy Alchemy (from the Arabic word , ) is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first ...

and used her fortune to pursue alchemical studies. She died in

Lützen Lützen () is a town in the Burgenlandkreis district of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Geography Lützen is situated in the Leipzig Bay, approximately southwest of the Leipzig city limits and northeast of Weißenfels. The town has access to the Bun ...

. A portrait of Heinecken painted by

Balthasar Denner Balthasar Denner (15 November 1685 – 14 April 1749) was a German painter, highly regarded as a portraitist. He painted mostly half-length and head-and-shoulders portraits and a few group portraits of families in interiors. Usually Denner con ...

is thought to have been destroyed during World War II.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Heinecken, Catharina Elisabeth 1683 births 1757 deaths 18th-century German women painters 18th-century German painters German alchemists 18th-century alchemists