Catharina Elisabeth Heinecken
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Catharina Elisabeth Heinecken (1683 – November 5, 1757) was a German artist and alchemist and the mother of a celebrated child prodigy,
Christian Heinrich Heineken Christian Heinrich Heineken or Heinecken (February 6, 1721 – June 27, 1725), also known as "the infant scholar of Lübeck", was a German child prodigy who lived only to the age of four. Life He was born in Lübeck, Germany, the son of Paul He ...
.


Family

Born in
Lübeck Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (german: Hansestadt Lübeck), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the stat ...
, she was the daughter of painter Franz Oesterreich and the stepdaughter of another painter, Karl Krieg. She married the painter and architect Paul Heinecken, and they had two children:
Carl Heinrich von Heineken Carl Heinrich von Heineken (1707–1791) was a German art historian who was for a time in charge of King Augustus III of Poland's royal art collection. Biography He was the son of Paul Heinecken, a painter and architect in Lübeck, Germany, an ...
, an art historian and collector who was later knighted, and
Christian Heinrich Heineken Christian Heinrich Heineken or Heinecken (February 6, 1721 – June 27, 1725), also known as "the infant scholar of Lübeck", was a German child prodigy who lived only to the age of four. Life He was born in Lübeck, Germany, the son of Paul He ...
, 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 (plural: 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 man-made (drinking glasses, boo ...
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 Christian Fritzsch that was disseminated widely. It is said that she was deeply interested in
alchemy Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, ...
and used her fortune to pursue alchemical studies. She died in
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 Bundesstraße 8 ...
. 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 German women painters German alchemists 18th-century alchemists