Morning

Runge spent most of his short life working on various versions of a hallucinatory and symbolic series of images representing the four times of day, which serve also as metaphors for the stages of life. Runge made many drawings of the compositions and even began a series of large-scale paintings, but his ideas reached their fullest maturity in this print series, which he issued in Hamburg in 1805. The very small first edition (numbering fewer than 25 impressions), was followed by a second edition a few years later; this print is from the first edition.

Runge conceived the prints in the linear “outline” style that was all the rage in avant-garde circles throughout Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. In Runge’s hands, a style that often had a chilly, neoclassical elegance took on a mystical, otherworldly character, especially when married to the artist’s strange, hallucinatory compositions. The prints are filled with a wild variety of symbolic plants (the lily of ‘Morning,’ the poppies of ‘Night’), impossible fountains, and weird landscapes populated by an abundance of naked children or putti.

Runge intended the prints to be a statement of his philosophy as well as an advertisement for his art. Indeed, he presented a set to the greatest German writer and philosopher of the age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who hung the prints in his music room. Goethe admired the suite tremendously, describing it to a visitor in 1811: "Just look at it: it's enough to drive you crazy --- beautiful and mad at the same time."

Perhaps sensing that people needed a key to understand the prints, Runge added explanatory titles to the second edition:

Morning is the boundless illumination of the universe.Day is the boundless formation of the creature that fills the universe.Evening is the boundless annihilation of existence into the origin of the universe.Night is the boundless depth of the realization of the unobliterated existence in God.