Gottlob Heinrich (he later called himself Heinrich Gottlob) Gutekunst (nomen est omen) was born in Stuttgart on 30 September 1832, son of the painter and daguerreotypist Johann Georg Adam Gottlob Gutekunst (1801-1858) and Katharina Luise, née Müller (1814-1845).
He was attracted to the art trade from an early age and, after finishing school at the age of 15, began a four-year apprenticeship at the art and paper dealer C.F. Autenrieth in Stuttgart. F. Autenrieth in Stuttgart. After his apprenticeship, at the age of 19 he took up a position with the then leading art dealer Goupil & Co. in Paris and at the age of 24 took over the management of the London branch. He subsequently worked for Goupil & Co. with a brief interruption.
In 1862, he married Karolina Sophie Emilie Friederike Haverkampf (1841-1872), daughter of the Stuttgart decorative painter Karl August Haverkampf. Gutekunst left his job in London at the end of 1863 to open an ‘antiques shop for old engravings, etchings, woodcuts, drawings and old books’ in his father-in-law's house at Kanzleistrasse 36 in Stuttgart. Shortly afterwards, his brother Georg Heinrich (1838-1895) also joined the business. The connections to Paris and London quickly turned Gutekunst's art dealership into one of the most important trading centres for prints, as can be seen from the stock catalogues that appeared in quick succession.
The first auction was held in 1868 with the ‘Collection of an Italian art lover’. The foreword to the auction contains the visionary sentence: ‘I have decided to make an attempt in this direction and by presenting this first auction catalogue of a selected collection of masterpieces of old and new art to an honoured audience, I take the liberty of inviting them to participate quite eagerly’.
In 1881, Kommerzienrat Gutekunst moves his company and family into a house at Olgastrasse 1B in Stuttgart and develops his company into the leading house in the field of Old Master drawings and prints.
His customers came from all over the world. In addition to his work as a prints dealer, Gutekunst's legendary publishing activities deserve a mention. He published mostly original-sized reproductions of prints under the title ‘Perlen mittelalterlicher Kunst’ (Pearls of Medieval Art).
Gutekunst was married twice and had seven children. Two of them, his sons Otto Carl Heinrich (1865-1947) and Richard Georg (1870-1961), would later become successful art dealers themselves. Gutekunst retired from the business in 1910. A few years later, this ‘aristocrat in his field’ died on 4 January 1914 at the age of 82. Thousands of works of art passed through his hands and he laid the firm foundations for the company history of Kornfeld Auctions.