Plants and landscape were one of Philipp Otto Runge’s favorite subjects and he once wrote “Is there not then in this new art—call it landscape if you like—a highest point to be achieved?” Corn flowers belongs to a series of cut-out silhouettes created by Runge around the early 1800s. Each presents a plant or flower in exacting detail, including each petal and leaf. The technique used was a traditional folk practice, which Runge learned early on from his mother. He ultimately produced well over one hundred such works, which he occasionally gave as gifts.

Cutting silhouettes was a popular pastime in nineteenth-century bourgeois circles. Runge loved making them. What distinguishes his silhouettes from many others is that they are not Schattenrisse since he used white instead of black paper – a model that artists like Moritz von Schwind (1804–1871) or the Danish author and amateur artist Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) would soon follow.

Runge had been drawn to this technique since childhood, writing to Goethe that he had always seen scissors als eine Verlängerung meiner Finger1 (as extensions of my fingers). His brother Daniel reports: Er fertigte dergleichen in den zerstreuendsten Momenten, sich dabey über jedes andre unterhaltend und das entstehende Gebilde schien sich bey dieser gleichsam plastischen Kunstübung fast wie selbstthätig unter der Schere in seine Hand zu bewegen.2 (“He made them in the most distracting moments while talking about everything else, and the shapes seemed to emerge under the scissors in his hand as if by themselves, as if it were a sculptural practice.”) This is intriguing to read since one would assume that transforming the three-dimensional shape of a plant into a two-dimensional silhouette is a rather complex process that requires a certain level of concentration.

Runge worked in two steps, first outlining the general shape, then working out the finer details. Over time, he created a veritable herbarium of silhouettes that depict a large variety of different plants. For him, they were in fundamentally explorations of nature – a nature he understood as the basis of his work. Accordingly, he saw both landscape and, inherent in it, the world of plants as divine revelations, with flowers embodying den lebendigen Geist Gottes3 (“the living spirit of God”). Even if, as here, artistic license occasionally prevails – the leaves along the rose’s branch in the silhouette are staggered whereas in nature they grow in symmetrical pairs –, translating the plant in this way reveals what Runge calls its Kunstwahrheit. To achieve this, one merely has to extract it from a piece of paper.