This being the first weekend of the state school summer holidays, today’s picture is Philipp Otto Runge’s sun-drenched portrayal of The Hulsenbeck Children at play. The painting was done in 1805-6 for the children’s father, the Hamburg merchant Friedrich August Hulsenbeck. History does not record the patron’s reaction to the work he had commissioned, but it is an unsettlingly intense creation and may have been more than he had bargained for. Runge captured the holiday mood of high summer but he also gave the rowdy brood of a German businessman the air of prophets or seers. Although they have the chubby faces of infants they stare glassily into space with a faraway, mystical gaze. Little August Hulsenbeck, in the centre of the painting, and his even littler baby brother, Friedrich, seated in a rustic baby carriage to the left, seem to stare right through us, as if penetrating to a higher truth. Their beatific but enigmatic expressions call to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that the gaze of children “is as yet unconquered and when we look into their faces we are disconcerted”. Runge’s pictureis not just a portrait but a nervy and highly charged celebration of childhood itself, a condition which the artist idealised as a state of visionary innocence. “We must all become children again to reach perfection,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.

But during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this harsh, repressive view was challenged and largely displaced by very different ideas about children. The English philosopher John Locke argued that a newborn child was not inherently evil but simply a blank slate or tabula rasa, whose character and propensities were to be “filled in” by responsible education. Locke disapproved of corporal punishment and advocated a relaxed and affectionate approach to bringing up children. His beliefs proved extremely influential, while further impetus was given to a new and increasingly permissive attitude to the young by the writings of the French Enlightenment author Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau did not merely temper the idea of Original Sin but turned it on its head. He believed, so to speak, in Original Virtue, arguing that children were innately good and were only ever corrupted by the decadence of society.

Runge’s painting is one of the defining images of this revolution in attitudes towards the child and towards childhood in general. Unlike the children of earlier portraiture, who would have been dressed as small versions of adults, the Hulsenbecks wear the newly fashionable loose garments that were tailored especially for the young to allow them maximum freedom of movement. They have been set free, too, from the watchful and restraining gaze of their elders. There is not a grown-up in sight, and although the children are plainly in the garden of their parents’ suburban mansion on the fringes of Hamburg – the city’s spires are silhouetted against the sky in the background of the picture – the artist has painted it very much as their domain. Maria, serene in her white dress, and August, wielding a whip above his head, have an imperious air about them. They lead their brother up the garden path as if processing in triumph.

To emphasise the grandeur and mystery of the young Hulsenbecks and to signal the totality of his own immersion in the kingdom of the child, Runge has played some ingenious, Alice-in-Wonderland games with scale. Not only has he painted his picture from the notional viewpoint of a four-year-old – the painter’s eyeline is level with that of August, who was four when the picture was done – but he has also cunningly diminished the scale of the white picket fence and the gabled house immediately behind the children, which gives them the air of giants. It is as if Runge wanted to magnify his youthful subjects, to get as close as possible to them, such was the degree to which they fascinated him. The painter’s style itself seems to suggest the distortions of magnification, especially in the rendering of the children’s swollen and spookily wide-eyed faces.

Runge belonged to a Northern European Romantic generation which took the Enlightenment feeling for the child to extremes that might have surprised even Rousseau. The artist believed that childhood was a blessed state and that children enjoyed a kind of direct communion with nature – and, through nature, with God – which was denied to the majority of adults. He described his own youthful feelings for the natural world and sense of union with God in long and rapturous prose poems, but also wrote in nearly tragic terms about growing older and the progressive dulling of his vision. “We can no longer establish this connection within ourselves, unless we recapture the original intensity of feeling, or become children again.”

Perhaps this sense of loss, of melancholic severance from a happier, better, younger self, more attuned to the divine mysteries of the universe, helps to explain the eccentric potency of Runge’s portraits of children. Staring at them, he was trying to recapture a part of himself. He almost certainly never read his English contemporary William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality. But if he had done, he would surely have recognised the sentiment.

 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid 
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”