The Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Esoteric observations in perplexing prose

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the most important figure of German Romanticism and a polymath who excelled in multiple fields. Not only was he perhaps the greatest man of letters in German history, he was also a philosopher, a statesman, an artist, and a scientist. Among his scientific writings, his book The Theory of Colours was published in 1810. It was written partially as a response to Isaac Newton’s analytical studies of color, which yielded the ROYGBIV theory that white light is in fact composed of all colors in the visible spectrum, as shown when refracted through a prism. Goethe, being a Romanticist, was less concerned with the physical nature of color but rather with the human eye’s perception and human mind’s conception of color. In addressing the physiology of human vision, largely ignored by Newton, Goethe’s Theory of Colours proved influential not only to scientists but also to philosophers, poets, and painters.

Goethe organizes his analyses of color phenomena into a rigid structure of progressive sections encompassing 920 numbered paragraphs. Unlike Newton, who examined color as a phenomenon independent of human perception, Goethe the humanist begins his study with the eye and proceeds outward. He first discusses what he calls “physiological colors,” which arise from the eye itself. For example, when one stares at a red object and then looks at a white wall, the eye perceives a green after image. Goethe examines many such optical illusions in great detail before proceeding to “physical colors,” which involve hues that arise through the use of prisms, lenses, cameras obscura and the like. The third part discusses “chemical colors,” detailing the ways in which colors can be brought forth, augmented, or fixated in certain substances through chemical processes. Subsequent sections cover topics such as the emotions generated by colors and the use of pigments in dying and painting. While the chapter structure looks very ordered in the table of contents, in the actual text it often feels counterintuitive and veers into digressions. To categorize his observations, Goethe invents confusing terminology like dioptrical, catoptrical, and epoptical colors, and even his use of the words objective and subjective is puzzlingly atypical.

Goethe created several plates of colored diagrams for this book, and often refers to them in his text. Public domain editions might not include these illustrations, but they can be found online through a Google image search. Goethe’s color wheel looks much the same as modern color wheels you’ve seen. In fact, he originated the idea of complementary colors that reside on opposite sides of the wheel. When verbally describing his scheme of color, however, Goethe’s ideas are much more confusing. Rather than three primary colors, Goethe proposes only two: yellow and blue. While admitting that green arises from the mixture between the two, he also asserts that somehow red is an intermediary between blue and yellow, a perplexing concept that defies not only the physics of the visible spectrum but also the perceptual logic of human vision.

Overall, Goethe’s prose is so confusing it’s often difficult to get any useful meaning out of many of his numbered paragraphs. Much of the blame for this, however, must fall upon the 1840 English translator Charles Lock Eastlake. Goethe’s Theory of Colours was no doubt an important and groundbreaking work for its time, but its value to today’s readers is questionable. The physics of light has come a long way in the past two centuries, so the science is only valuable for its commendable historical significance. Nowadays, this book will probably only be of interest to artists looking for some arcane wisdom on color use, of which they will find little of practical worth. Readers interested in the physiological and psychological science of color would be better off reading a more recent text like Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception.

Illustrated plates from Goethe’s The Theory of Colours.

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