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Philipp Otto Runge was born on July 23, 1777, the ninth of 11 children of a tradesman and cargo shipowner and his wife in Wolgast, Pomerania, on the Baltic Sea, then under Swedish rule. As a child, he was frequently ill with tuberculosis, being often educated at home. In 1795, he began a commercial apprenticeship at his older brother Daniel’s firm in Hamburg. In 1799, Daniel supported Otto financially to begin the study of painting at the Copenhagen Academy. In 1801, Otto moved to Dresden to continue his studies, where among others he met his future wife Pauline Bassenge and the painter Caspar David Friedrich. He also began to study extensively the writings of the seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme. In 1803, on a visit to Weimar, Runge unexpectedly met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the two formed a friendship based on their common interests in color and art. After marrying Pauline in 1804, they moved to Hamburg. But due to imminent war dangers (Napoleonic siege of Hamburg) they relocated in 1805 to his parental home in Wolgast where they remained until 1807, then returning to Hamburg. Together they had four children, the last born on the day after Runge’s premature death in 1810. In March of 1810, Runge became ill with tuberculosis again to which he succumbed on December 2 of the year. Runge was of a mystical, deeply Christian turn of mind, and in his artistic work, he tried to express notions of the harmony of the universe through symbolism of color, form, and numbers. He considered blue, yellow, and red to be symbolic of the Christian trinity, equating blue with God and the night; red with morning, evening, and Jesus; and yellow with the Holy Spirit. [1] During his short life, he became one of the most important German painters of the Romantic period.
32.1 Die Farben-Kugel
Runge’s interest in color was the natural result of his work as a painter and of having an enquiring mind. Among his accepted tenets was that “as is known, there are only three colors, yellow, red, and blue” (letter to Goethe of July 3, 1806 [2]). His goal was to establish the complete world of colors resulting from mixture of the three primaries, among themselves and together with white and black. In the same lengthy letter, Runge discussed in some detail his views on color order and included a sketch of a mixture circle, with the three primary colors forming an equilateral triangle and, together with their pair-wise mixtures, a hexagon. He arrived at the concept of the color sphere sometime in 1807, as indicated in his letter to Goethe of November 21 of that year, by expanding the hue circle into a sphere, with white and black forming the two poles [3].
Hand-illuminated illustration from P. O. Runge, Farben-Kugel [4]
In addition to a description of the color sphere, the book contains an illustrated essay on rules of color harmony by Runge and one on color in nature written by Runge’s friend Henrik Steffens. Runge’s premature death limited the impact of this work. Goethe, who had read the manuscript before publication, mentioned it optimistically in his Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre of 1810 as “successfully concluding this kind of effort” [5]. More detailed similar systems were published soon thereafter by Gaspard Grégoire in France and by Mathias Klotz in Germany [6, 7].