Evening Sky

But it was precisely this impossibility of fulfillment in intuition and longing that won the day. One young painter like Runge and poets like Novalis and Hoffmann many passages from Franz Sternbald had an almost bewitching effect -- for instance this passage, when a sunset moves Sternbald’s friend to the following exclamation:


If you painters could show me the like in your works . . . I would gladly do without treatment, passion, composition, and all the rest -- if you could find such a rosy red sky as kindly nature uses today to unlock for me the gate to the gleaming land, the home of my childhood’s intimation . . . O my friends, if you could only entice the fantastical music composed by this evening’s sky into your painting! ! Page 66 ~ Excerpt: “Romanticism ~ A German Affair” Author Rudiger Safranski