Die Hülsenbeck'schen Kinder

German Romantic painting in 1805 was full of misty mountains and lonely figures, so it is striking that Philipp Otto Runge's best-known picture is three small children in a suburban garden. He painted the children of a Hamburg merchant, his brother's business partner, and he set his easel low, at their eye level, so we meet them as they are rather than looking down on them. Maria, August and little Friedrich cluster by a fence with a huge sunflower towering overhead, the toddler gripping at its leaves. This was a moment when Romantic writers had begun to treat childhood as a state worth taking seriously in itself, not merely a rehearsal for being grown. Runge died of tuberculosis five years later, only 33, much of his grand plan for a new kind of art left unfinished.