Heinrich Mücke was born in Breslau, then in Prussia and today in Poland, in the spring of 1806. He received formal training in art at both the Berlin Academy and the Düsseldorf Academy. Mücke worked under the well established painter Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow. 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.
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 in Verona (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 Düsseldorf: 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 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 genre 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.
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