The invention relates to a device for the evanescent illumination of a sample, said device comprising an optical illumination element provided with an optical corrective element (3) and an objective (4) arranged downstream from said corrective element, in order to evanescently illuminate the sample with a supplied ray beam containing optical radiation with at least two different wavelengths. The corrective optical element (3) has a transverse chromatic aberration which, during the illumination, leads to the optical radiation penetrating the pupil (14) of the objective (4) at different heights according to the wavelength, and is selected in such a way that the wavelength-related difference of the penetration depths of the radiation into the sample is reduced during the evanescent illumination.