Heinrich Muche

Heinrich Muche (* 1649 in Breslau ; † around 1696 there ) was a German painter and traveler to East Asia.

Life

Heinrich Muche, a trained painter, had, according to his own account, received the desire to travel “by reading various descriptions of the country” and when he was twenty he looked around “again in such books”. Especially "Mr. Johan Neuhof's description of the trip to China" ( Joan Nieuhof : Het gezantschap of the Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan the great Tartarian Cham, the two-word Keizer van China (1665)) stimulated him to set off for the Far East. On June 13, 1669, he left his hometown and moved to Amsterdam , where he was hired as a soldier in the East India Company (VOC) on August 20 . Her fleet ran out on October 13 and, after a quiet crossing with only one dead, reached the roadstead of Batavia on March 23, 1670 . Muche initially served as a soldier, but in 1672 he was assigned to the fortress pharmacy, where he served the thirsty doctor Andreas Cleyer as a draftsman and in this function experienced Cleyer's natural history research at close range. However, relations between the two were not in the best of conditions, and in 1673 Muche moved to Japan with Johannes Camphuys (1634–1695), the designated head of the VOC Dejima branch . He didn't see much of the country, but he spent the year with a boss who was thirsty for knowledge. Camphuys was a well-read man who collected Japanese curios and campaigned for researchers such as Georg Eberhard Rumpf from Wölfersheim, the “Pliny Indicus”, and Engelbert Kaempfer , a pioneer in the exploration of Japan. From 1691 to 1704 he held the post of Governor General of the Dutch East Indies. In Japan he commissioned Muche to produce various sheets of paper, and he had him work out his sketch of the audience chamber he had secretly taken in the Edo Palace.

After a year of service in Japan, Muche worked from December 1674 to June 1675 for the map makers in Batavia. In September 1678 he was even used for a portrait of Sultan Kaicil Sibori Amsterdam , who ruled the spice island of Ternate from 1675 to 1690 .

Back in Breslau, Muche started a travel book that he completed in 1694: Thirteen-year-old East Indian Travel Day Register . With 988 sheets, he had created the largest such manuscript of the 17th century. Like so many other East Indiamans, Muche tried to present as learned a work as possible and enriched his observations with Dutch, French, Latin and German poems and read-out stories. Much of it can be dispensed with today, but Muche offers all kinds of information on people, processes and objects, so that the work is useful as a supplement to the sources of the VOC and other travel books. The original manuscript was lost in World War II. However, the text has been preserved as a typescript that the Berlin art historian Otto Kümmel (1874–1952) produced during the 1930s for a publication by the Berlin Japan Institute. Most of the watercolors enclosed with the travel book have been lost. The fate of the numerous commissioned works in Batavia has not yet been followed. An album by an unknown hand in Berlin ( Effigies nationum ) is probably based on templates from Muche. At least one of the prepared for Cleyer leaves was for an illustration in the Miscellanea Curiosa of Leopoldina used.

Muche belongs to that circle of artists who contributed to the formation of new pictorial traditions in the reproduction of nature and people in East India.

Works

Thirteen Year East Indian Travel Day Register . Manuscript, Breslau 1694. (A typescript of the missing manuscript from the former Wroclaw City Library is guarded in Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage Ethnological Museum).

literature

• Neverman, Hans: Reports of a Silesian about Indonesia at the end of the 17th century. In: Baessler archive. Contributions to ethnology, New Series, Volume IV, 1956, pp. 91-104.
• Gelder, Roelof van: The East Indian Adventure. Germans in the service of the United East India Company of the Netherlands (VOC), 1600–1800. Hamburg: Convent, 2004.
• Wolfgang Michel: «The East Indian and neighboring kingdoms, the noblest rarities, a short explanation» - New finds on the life and work of the Leipzig surgeon and trader Caspar Schamberger (1623–1706). Kyushu University, The Faculty of Languages ​​and Cultures Library, No 1. Fukuoka: Hana-Shoin, 2010, pp. 40-53. ISBN 978-4-903554-71-6 ( digitized in Kyushu University Institutional Repository )