Goethe's Theory of Colours

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe's Theory of Colours, published in German in 1810 and translated by the painter Charles Lock Eastlake in 1840, is the poet's challenge to Newton's optics. Goethe argues that color cannot be understood by splitting light with a prism alone; it arises from the interplay of light and darkness as perceived by the eye. He describes physiological colors such as afterimages and colored shadows, the colors produced by turbid media like the blue of the sky, and the chemical colors of pigments and dyes, before turning to the moral and aesthetic effect of colors and their use in painting. Physicists rejected his conclusions, but his careful observations of how we actually see have kept the book alive among artists and students of perception. It is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, with the first chapter free.