Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes his book Zu Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) on May 16, 1810.

It is generally acknowledged in Goethe's time that, as Isaac Newton had shown in his Opticks in 1704, colorless (white) light is split up into its component colors when directed through a prism.

Goethe's starting point was the supposed discovery of how Newton erred in the prismatic experiment, and by 1793 Goethe had formulated his arguments against Newton in the essay "Über Newtons Hypothese der diversen Refrangibilität" ("On Newton's hypothesis of diverse refrangibility").

Yet, by 1794, Goethe had begun to increasingly note the importance of the physiological aspect of colors.

As Goethe notes in the historical section, Louis Bertrand Castel had already published a criticism of Newton's spectral description of prismatic color in 1740 in which he observed that the sequence of colors split by a prism depended on the distance from the prism—and that Newton was looking at a special case.

In the preface to the Theory of Colors, the poet's views on the nature of colors and how these are perceived by humans, Goethe explains that he has tried to apply the principle of polarity, in the work—a proposition that belongs to his earliest convictions and is constitutive of his entire study of nature.

The books contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as colored shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration.

The work originated in Goethe's occupation with painting and will mainly exert  an influence on the arts (Philipp Otto Runge, J. M. W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wassily Kandinsky).

The book is a successor to two short essays entitled "Contributions to Optics".

Physicists will reject Gothe's work, but a number of philosophers and physicists will concern themselves with it, including Thomas Johann Seebeck, Arthur Schopenhauer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Steiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Göd'el, and Mitchell Feigenbaum.

Goethe's book provides a catalogue of how color is perceived in a wide variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations to be special cases.

Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern is not so much with the analytic treatment of color, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived.

Philosophers will come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human color perception as presented by Goethe—a subject analyzed at length by Wittgenstein in his comments on Goethe's theory in Remarks on Color.