Madame Hudtwalcker
In her house, wealth and art intertwined
Elisabeth Hudtwalcker (1752 – 1804)
The little girl had lived to be only eleven months old. Mourning, the parents stood before the tiny, lifeless body. The undertaker had already been summoned. Then, with trembling hands, the mother took a penknife, bent over her child, and made a small incision in the side of her neck. Only when dark blood began to seep forth did the parents release the body. For only this sign had finally convinced them that there was truly no life left within their little daughter.
What seems cruel today was in reality an example of touching parental love. And the woman who found the fortitude to cut the neck of her dead child was neither foolish nor driven mad by grief; rather, she was one of the most intelligent, modern, and courageous women of 18th-century Hamburg: Elisabeth Hudtwalcker.
It was the life of a woman who, through the birth of nine children—three of whom died in infancy—was forced to pay a cruel tribute to the backwardness of a bygone era. Yet, on the other hand, she was privileged to witness the dawning of a new age in the company of progressive thinkers and celebrated artists.
Elisabeth, born on July 6, 1752, was the youngest of three children. Her father died shortly thereafter, at the mere age of 31, from consumption. His little daughter was also of delicate health. However, this did not deter her from acquiring an excellent education in a remarkably short time through diligence and ambition. She spoke fluent English and French, committed the classics to memory, and practiced the minuet, a dance long since displaced by more modern steps. Her favorite pursuit, however, was drawing.
Though her frail constitution temporarily proved an obstacle to marriage—as the merchant Johann Michael Hudtwalcker, who sought her hand as a 28-year-old in 1775, first had to overcome the resistance of his father, who inspected the young bride and deemed her “sickly and weak.” Yet, the bride’s mother expressed a similar sentiment regarding the groom, and so the scales were, more or less, balanced once more.
Through this marriage, Elisabeth found herself at the very heart of Hamburg’s refined moneyed elite. But since her interests lay less with accounts and competitors than with works of art and artists — and since she continued to paint herself with great enthusiasm — she soon gathered around her a circle of famous, gifted, or at the very least interesting contemporaries such as, today, perhaps only the detergent queen Gabriele Henkel in Düsseldorf could afford to entertain.
The Hudtwalckers’ home was frequented by the landscape draughtsman Christoph Heinrich Kniep, who had accompanied Goethe to Sicily, and by the French sculptor Dominique Rachette. The celebrated engraver Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki appraised Elisabeth’s drawings, while the later, less successful sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow invited her to Berlin to visit his studio. Even the Picasso of his day, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, helped the merchant’s wife with canvas and palette.
Meanwhile, her husband turned to politics: he was elected to the city council. He later recalled: “But Elisabeth was not impressed by it. On the contrary, she laughed heartily because I was so shaken by it.”
But life also had many blows of fate in store for the family. Their second daughter succumbed to an infection when she was eleven months old. The eldest fell ill after being vaccinated against smallpox and temporarily lost her sight. In the same year, Elisabeth lost her mother. She herself was struck down by a severe fever. Another daughter died at just eight weeks, the next again after eleven months, and once more from the same infection.
Elisabeth herself died of fever — on 22 November 1804. She died surrounded by her family, after a bourgeois life rich in everything, in happiness and in sorrow, and perhaps for that very reason so characteristic of her age.
Josef Nyary
Die Welt, 25 March 1977
Translated from the original German text published on this website in 2019.
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