Philipp Otto Runge

Philipp Otto Runge (born July 23, 1777, Wolgast, West Pomerania [now in Germany]—died December 2, 1810, Hamburg, French Empire [now in Germany]) was a German Romantic painter, draftsman, and art theorist known for his expressive portraits and symbolic landscapes and for his groundbreaking colour theory, expounded in Farben-Kugel (1810; Colour Sphere).

Runge had no formal art training until he began taking private drawing classes in 1797 in Hamburg, while he worked as an assistant at his brother Daniel’s shipping company (1795–99). The works that date from that period are copies of Italian Renaissance prints as well as early portraits and self-portraits done in chalk. Runge attended the Royal Danish Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture Academy (later the Academy of Fine Arts) in Copenhagen from 1799 to 1801 and then the Academy of Art in Dresden (now in Germany) for the next two years. He moved back to Hamburg in 1803. By that time he had become well connected to many Romantic writers, musicians, and artists—writers Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck and artists Anton Graff, Caspar David Friedrich, and Friedrich August von Klinkowström among them.

Runge was greatly influenced by Romantic ideals of subjectivity and emotional expression and actively ventured away from the more rational and harmonious Neoclassical style in which he had been trained. He was particularly impressed by Tieck’s ideas on mysticism and the divine energy found in nature, and with that in mind he began working on his cycle of drawings titled Times of Day in 1803, a series of four allegorical works that represent morning, midday, evening, and night as well as the four seasons and the life cycle—birth, maturity, decline, death. The cycle was published in a limited edition of 25 sets in 1805 (and more widely in 1807) and was favoured especially by German writer Goethe, who became a great supporter of Runge. Though he set out to reproduce the cycle as oil paintings, Runge only completed Morning (1808; second version 1809–10) before he died.

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In the last five years of Runge’s life, he painted numerous portraits and self-portraits, religious landscapes, and what he called “allegorical” or “symbolic” landscapes. His portraits, many of family members and friends, were celebrated for their sincerity and for their luminous displays of light and colour. In his landscapes, and even in his portraits set in nature (e.g., We Three, 1805; The Hülsenbeck Children, 1805; The Artist’s Parents with Their Grandchildren, 1806), he used the features of the natural setting to reflect emotion and make statements about the relationship between humans and nature or as substitutions for traditional religious and biblical iconography (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1805–06). It was during those years that Runge also worked on his colour theory treatise, Farben-Kugel, a pioneering explanation of the colour system in three dimensions. Runge succumbed to tuberculosis and died at age 33 in 1810.