Neoclassicism and Romanticism

 

(Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map)



 

Philipp Otto Runge



 

Philipp Otto Runge

(b Wolgast, 23 July 1777; d Hamburg, 2 Dec 1810).

German painter, draughtsman and theorist. He stands alongside Caspar David Friedrich as a leading figure in German Romantic painting even though his early death restricted his oeuvre to relatively few stages of development. The enduring prominence of philosophical and theoretical concerns suggests that further work would have contributed to the history of ideas as well as to that of art. Runge’s greatest influence was on later, largely 20th-century artists and thinkers rather than on his immediate contemporaries. While 19th-century developments certainly bore out Runge’s claim for a new, symbolic role for landscape, it was only in the later 19th century and in the 20th century that serious consideration was given to his colour theory and to his concept of the total work of art appealing to several senses (subsequently termed GESAMTKUNSTWERK).

 

The Artist's Parents
1806
Oil on canvas, 196 x 131 cm
Kunsthalle, Hamburg