Philipp Otto Runge
The colour theorist of German Romanticism.
Philipp Otto Runge wrote about colour and sought to create a new kind of spiritual landscape painting. He died young of tuberculosis.
Philipp Otto Runge was born in 1777 in Wolgast, which then belonged to Swedish Pomerania. He was one of many children of a shipowner and merchant. He was sickly as a child and first trained as a merchant in Hamburg. There he came into contact with artists and literature and decided to become a painter. He studied at the academy in Copenhagen from 1799 to 1801 and then moved to Dresden, where he met Caspar David Friedrich and the Romantic writers.
Runge wanted to create a new kind of art that would be spiritual and religious without being bound to the Church's traditional subjects. His main project was The Times of Day, four pictures of morning, day, evening and night filled with flowers, children and symbols of the cycles of life and nature. He published them as engravings in 1805 and began painting them on a large scale. Only Morning was begun in oil. It is in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
He was also an outstanding portrait painter. The Hülsenbeck Children (1805–06) in the Hamburger Kunsthalle shows three children in a garden, seen at the children's own eye level, with an unusually serious force. His colours are clear and the light cool and sharp. He was also skilled at cutting silhouettes.
Runge took a deep interest in colour and corresponded with Goethe on the subject. In 1810 he published the treatise The Colour Sphere, in which he arranged the colours in a three-dimensional model with white and black at the poles. It was an early attempt to systematise colour. He also wrote down the tale of the fisherman and his wife, which the Brothers Grimm then included in their collection.
In 1804 Runge married Pauline Bassenge, and they had four children. He died of tuberculosis in Hamburg in 1810, only 33 years old. His work remained unfinished, but he is regarded as one of the most important thinkers and painters of German Romanticism.