The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

Die Miniatur Über den Künstler

The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

DE
The Miniature About the Artist

Lady in a White Dress with a Red Shawl

Heinrich Jakob Aldenrath

Heinrich Jakob Aldenrath is one of the most important north German miniaturists of the 19th century. From 1814, he maintained a lifelong life and working partnership in Hamburg with Friedrich Carl Gröger, born in Plön. Gröger worked as a miniaturist, a large-format portraitist, and also especially as a lithographer. Both artists were commissioned for portraits by the nobility of Schleswig-Holstein and the middle class in Lübeck and Hamburg.


His portrait of a lady in a white Empire dress exudes great calm. The monochrome background combined with the strong colour of the red shawl, the golden-yellow necklace, and the precisely contoured, large dark brown eyes contribute to the atmosphere of calm. The sitter wears her hair in an artfully arranged Apollo knot at the top of her head, which was the fashion of the time, with descending rows of curls framing the temples.

The portrait is very similar to that of Helene Therese Münchmeyer (1806–1854), which was painted by Gröger in around 1831. In 1830, Helene Therese married Johann Friedrich Justus, who was a tobacco manufacturer from Hamburg and also the consul general of Tuscany. Since Gröger and Aldenrath occasionally worked on the same paintings, it is possible that the sitters may be identical.2 
J. S. O.

1 See her portrait by Friedrich Carl Gröger (attributed) in a charcoal drawing in the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (inv. no. EB 1914 / 1632). The sitter has very similar facial features as well as an identical hairstyle and the same earrings. See Jaacks 1992, p. 100.
2 On Aldenrath and Gröger, see Jaacks 1992, pp. 45–47 and pp. 94–114, and Thimann 2026, pp. 45–58.