It took Philipp Otto Runge eight years to develop his colour theory, which he expressly intended for use by painters. His slender book was published by the Perthes company in Hamburg in 1810 – the year of his death and just a few months before Goethe’s Theory of Colour appeared. Goethe had already read Runge’s manuscript and adopted several passages for his own work. A conspicuous feature of Runge’s Colour Sphere is the large number of hand-coloured plates. These vividly illustrate the relationships (or “affinities”) between the colours, as well as their harmonies and dissonances.