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Goethe believed his work on colour was more important than his poetry. In this book he challenges Newton's theory that white light is made of coloured rays…
Goethe believed his work on colour was more important than his poetry. In this book he challenges Newton's theory that white light is made of coloured rays and studies colour as we actually experience it: physiological colours created by the eye itself, such as after-images and coloured shadows; physical colours seen through prisms, which he argues appear at the edges where light meets darkness; and chemical colours in substances. The last part, on the 'sensory and moral effect' of colour, explores how yellow, blue, red and green affect our feelings.
Context and significance
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Zur Farbenlehre in 1810. Physicists rejected his attack on Newton, but painters such as Turner and philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein drew on his observations. This translation, of 1840, is by the painter Charles Lock Eastlake. Newton's own account is in his Opticks, and Goethe's masterpiece is Faust.
About the author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was born in Frankfurt and trained as a lawyer, but at twenty-four his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made him famous across Europe. Invited to the small court of Weimar, he served as a minister for years while writing poems, plays and novels, and pursuing serious research in botany, anatomy and the theory of colour.
His friendship with the poet Schiller and his journey to Italy shaped German classicism, and his Faust, the work of sixty years, is the summit of German literature. Goethe admired the Persian poet Hafez and the Quran, and his West-Eastern Divan was an early bridge between European and Islamic poetry.