Philipp Otto Runge (German: [ˈʁʊŋə]; 1777–1810) was a German artist, draftsman, painter, and color theorist. Runge and Caspar David Friedrich are often regarded as the leading painters of the German Romantic movement. He is frequently compared with William Blake by art historians, although Runge's short ten-year career is not easy to equate to Blake's career. By all accounts he had a brilliant mind and was well versed in the literature and philosophy of his time. He was a prolific letter writer and maintained correspondences and friendships with contemporaries such as Carl Ludwig Heinrich Berger, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Henrik Steffens, and Ludwig Tieck. His paintings are often filled with symbolism and allegories. For eight years he planned and refined his seminal project, Tageszeiten (Times of Day), four monumental paintings 50 square meters each, which in turn were only part of a larger collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk that was to include poetry, music, and architecture, but remained unrealized at the time of his death. With it he aspired to abandon the traditional iconography of Christianity in European art and find a new expression for spiritual values through symbolism in landscapes. One historian stated "In Runge's painting we are clearly dealing with the attempt to present contemporary philosophy in art." He wrote an influential volume on color theory in 1808, Sphere of Colors, that was published the same year he died.
Runge was born in 1777 in Wolgast, a town in northeast Germany on the Baltic Sea (Swedish Pomerania at that time). He contracted pulmonary tuberculosis at an early age and was in frail health throughout his life. As a youth he attended a school headed by Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten. His father was a successful merchant and ship owner and Philipp and his older brother Daniel were groomed to follow him in his business. Daniel moved to Hamburg to manage a branch of the family business and Philipp soon followed to serve as an apprentice (ca. 1793 – 96). There he began making contact with poets, publishers, and art collectors such as Matthias Claudius, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Justus Perthes, and Johannes Michael Speckter who encouraged Runge in the arts, philosophy, and intellectual interests. He started taking drawing lessons in Hamburg in 1797 with Heinrich Joachim Herterich and Gerdt Hardorff the Elder and it was only after several years in Hamburg, in his early twenties, that Runge decided on a career as an artist.
