Art, literature & history
Lilac
1800–1805
- Dating
- Date range
- Held at
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Medium
- Silhouette cut from off-white laid paper mounted to modern blue laid paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 39.4 x 27 cm (15 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.); Matted: 55.9 x 40.6 cm (22 x 16 in.)
- Collection no.
- 2023.120
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
Philipp Otto Runge. Lilac. Philipp Otto Runge; The Cleveland Museum of Art; John L. Severance Fund. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
About this artwork
Lilac — Philipp Otto Runge. 1800–1805.
Medium: Silhouette cut from off-white laid paper mounted to modern blue laid paper. Dimensions: Sheet: 39.4 x 27 cm (15 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.); Matted: 55.9 x 40.6 cm (22 x 16 in.).
Collection record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
Lilac belongs to a series of cut-out silhouettes created by Philipp Otto 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; this work, for example, was offered by the artist to the Specktors, a Hamburg based family of artists.
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.