Philipp Otto Runge

Philipp Otto Runge died at 33, of tuberculosis, with his grandest plans unfinished, and yet he is counted with Caspar David Friedrich as a founder of German Romantic art. He wanted painting to carry the weight of religion and nature together, and set himself huge symbolic tasks.

His main project was a set of pictures called the 'Times of Day', morning, day, evening, night, worked out as elaborate designs full of plants, light, and floating children, meant to hang together like a chapel and be seen with music and poetry. He completed them mainly as prints and studies before he ran out of time.

Runge was also a serious theorist of colour. He built a colour sphere, arranging every hue in three dimensions, and corresponded with the poet Goethe, who was working on his own theory of colours. He died in Hamburg in 1810, leaving behind, among the unfinished symbolism, a handful of piercingly direct portraits of his family and of small children.