The Hülsenbeck Children

Philipp Otto Runge’s The Hülsenbeck Children portrays the three children of his brother’s family seated in a small garden wagon beneath an immense, luminous sky. The children’s direct, unsmiling gazes and the sweep of the landscape behind them give the modest subject an almost cosmic dignity. Painted between 1805 and 1806, the work is a landmark of German Romanticism, in which the ordinary world is charged with spiritual significance.