A note on a romantic painter, Otto Runge I will write about what I do now for a class at university next week. I do a bit of research on Otto Runge who was a painter of Romanticism in Germany. He was born in 1777 at Wolgast and started to practice painting at the age of 21. From a lot of dessins and studies, we can see that he trained very earnestly in the Academy of Kopenhagen, then in Dresden where there were many copies of ancient sculptures and paintings in the rennaisance and baroque style. By imitating these models, the painter tried hard to realize the perfect expression of human body. As you know, artists of classicism were eager to acquire the beauty, which had once achieved in sculptures in ancient Greece. This ancient beauty was ideal for artists in the renaissance and neo-classicism era, that is, in the 15th century and from the middle of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century. Therefore, until the latter half of the 19th century, most of the academies have taught students how to obtain ideal expressions of human body. To put it concrete, teachers told students to copy gypsums of ancient sculptures. Runge was also one of such students. However, unlike other classical painters, Runge’s essential interest was shared with romantic authors and poets such as Tiek, Novalis and Brentano. All of them were Runge’s friends and they sometimes exchanged their letters to explore their thinking, and Runge read their friends’ work intensely as well. To summarize, his visual resources were classical obtained by copies of ancient sculptures while his theoretical resources were romantic cultivated by poetry and novels at that time. This contradiction between visual and theoretical resources made his painting eccentric and outstanding among other painters in Romanticism. For example, “Morning”, which is considered as one of his masterpieces, is like a painting of surrealism, which is, in fact, the movement occurred nearly 100 years after his death. Although I understand that this painting is the result of his struggle to get a new artistic expression, I find it weird and uncanny. To be frank, I don’t like it. So it is almost intolerable to prepare a presentation for 35 minutes only about this painting.