Johann Heinrich Müntz

Johann Heinrich Müntz (1727–1798) was an Alsatian-Swiss painter and architect, known when working in England as John Henry Muntz. He was in England for seven years, and at the heart of a group trying to adapt the rococo to architecture and interior design. He has been seen as a pioneer of the Gothic Revival.

Early life Müntz was born in Mulhouse, then geographically part of Alsace but politically in the Old Swiss Confederacy. He travelled, and served in the French army. He was a captain of his Swiss regiment, spent time in Spain with it, and drew examples of the Gothic style there. Bentley brought him to England, and introduced him by letter to Horace Walpole. Müntz worked for some time at Chute's residence, The Vyne near Basingstoke, where some of his paintings remained.

Walpole and Müntz fell out, and Müntz left Walpole's employ in 1759. One version is that they quarrelled over Müntz's relationship with one of Walpole's servants, whom he subsequently married. Mowl sets out a theory on a midlife crisis for Walpole who also broke with Bentley, a transition to female friends from a demanding male coterie.

Müntz then went to London.

In 1761–2 Müntz designed an octagonal "Gothic Room" for Richard Bateman's house at Old Windsor. Müntz was commissioned by James Caulfeild, 4th Viscount Charlemont to make designs for his estate at Marino, Dublin. These plans of 1762 may well never have got off the drawing board, but a small-scale "Gothic Room" was in a tower there in 1763, seen by the Countess of Northumberland.

Later life In 1763 Müntz went to Holland, setting off to paint landscapes of Greece and Jerusalem. He worked in Weesp and Muiden as a porcelain painter and a metallurgist for Benjamin Veitel Ephraim, till around 1777. He cooperated with Johann Georg Michael in the design of an English garden at Beeckestijn. In the 1780s he was in Poland, and built a villa there for Stanisław Poniatowski. and later in the catalogue of Henry George Bohn, with a description of Müntz's system of ovals, and a version in Dutch. There was also such a manuscript in the South Kensington Art Library.