Zur Farbenlehre. Two text volumes and one plate volume. Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1810.
First edition, three volumes. Text volumes, XLVIII, 654 pp.; XXVIII, 757, [1] pp. Plate volume, 24, 12 pp. Entirely uncut, the original wrappers bound in, the plate volume's wrapper titled Sechszehn Tafeln nebst der Erklärung zu Goethe's Farbenlehre. Chief among the sixteen plates is Goethe's own colour wheel, the symmetrical Farbenkreis of 1809, the image through which his colour theory entered the visual imagination and the ancestor of the colour wheel still used in art and design. Text volumes large octavo (220 × 130 mm); plate volume (245 × 200 mm).
Half-leather bindings c. 1900 with discreet spine gilding and the original wrappers bound in (near-fine, almost entirely free of spotting; entirely uncut).
Goethe's greatest scientific work—and the book he considered his finest achievement.
This is Goethe's longest scientific work and, in his own estimate, his best, the culmination of the optical studies he had begun with the Beyträge zur Optik of 1791, and one of the grandest material productions in his lifetime bibliography. He did not regard colour as a minor excursion from poetry. In Eckermann's record he claimed no special pride in being a poet, but did take pride in having grasped the truth in "the difficult science of colours" [Eckermann, 19 February 1829], a self-assessment essential to the book's place in a Goethe collection.
The work did not displace Newtonian optics, and its afterlife lies elsewhere. Goethe argued against Newton's demonstration that white light is composite and built instead a theory grounded in sensuous experience, contrast, turbidity and the conditions of perception. "Search nothing beyond the phenomena," he wrote, for the phenomena themselves are the teaching [Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, FA I/13, 49]. The physiological-colour section is the strongest part and typifies his psychological approach; the historical section is itself an important model of scientific historiography. This is why the book mattered to artists, philosophers and physiologists even where physicists rejected its polemic. Schopenhauer's colour theory grew from his discussions with Goethe; Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour later returned to the perceptual questions Goethe had made vivid; and the Farbenlehre shaped artists from Runge and Turner to Kandinsky and Klee, while engaging thinkers as various as Seebeck, Helmholtz, Steiner and Heisenberg. Robert A. Crone's history of colour places Goethe's influence highest among physiologists and psychologists [Crone, A History of Color].
The plate volume is the part most often lacking, and a complete copy must include it; its troubled publication history was traced by G. Schmid in Schicksal einer Goetheschrift. Here all three volumes are present together.
PROVENANCE
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Goedeke IV/2, 583, 46; Hagen 347, 347c, 347d; Kippenberg I, 386 and 389; Schmid, Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften 55–57, 59; Borst 1111.
Fischer, Der Verleger J. F. Cotta, I (2003), no. 764; G. Schmid, Schicksal einer Goetheschrift. Druckgeschichtliche Funde zur Farbenlehre (Halle, 1937); Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (FA I/13, 49); Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 19 February 1829; Arthur Schopenhauer, Ueber das Sehn und die Farben (1816); Robert A. Crone, A History of Color(Dordrecht, 1999).
