Witches in art: 20 paintings, from Baldung Grien to Waterhouse
Before the witch was a Halloween costume, she was a picture. Twenty masterworks show how painters invented her: the cauldron, the goat in the night sky, the pointed hat and the beautiful enchantress with a cup.
Witches are older than painting, but it took artists to give them a face. The pointed hat, the cauldron, the goat in the night sky, the beautiful enchantress with a cup: all of them were drawn, engraved or painted before they ever reached a Halloween costume.
These twenty works, all in Fable’s Masterworks collection and each prepared for print from its museum scan, follow the witch from a German woodcut of 1510 to the sorceresses of the Victorian Salon, in five chapters.
The witch is invented
Witches were feared long before anyone painted them. In the decades after 1500, printmakers in Germany and painters in Flanders gave the fear a picture: naked women with pots and bones, a goat in the sky, a kitchen where spells are brewed. These images were made for collectors as much as for preachers, and they are as much about curiosity as about horror.
1. The Witches
Hans Baldung Grien, The Witches, 1510. Chiaroscuro woodcut. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The picture that invented the witches’ sabbath. Baldung was a pupil of Dürer, and he printed this from two blocks so the night glows grey and cream. A jar spews vapour into the sky, one witch lifts a dish of something unspeakable, and another rides a goat backwards through the air. It was made to be collected, and it set the look of the witch for centuries.
2. The Witches’ Kitchen
Frans Francken the Younger, The Witches’ Kitchen, 1610. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
An Antwerp painter turns the witches’ night into a busy domestic scene. Old women stir the cauldron and read from a book of spells, a young woman is prepared for the flight, and the floor is a cabinet of horrors: skulls, bones, a toad, a sword. Francken painted this subject again and again, because collectors kept asking for it.
3. Witches at their Incantations
Salvator Rosa, Witches at their Incantations, c. 1646. The National Gallery, London.
Rosa was the Baroque painter of wild places and dark subjects, and this is his great witchcraft canvas. In the dark a hanged man, a skeleton and a circle of crones crowd together, each busy with a different spell. It rewards a long look: the longer you stand in front of it, the more you find.
4. The Disillusioned Medea
Paulus Bor, The Disillusioned Medea, c. 1640. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Medea is the most feared sorceress of Greek myth, yet Bor paints her as a girl lost in thought, chin in hand, a wand loose in her fingers. The altar and the garlanded statue behind her are the only hint of what she can do. A quiet, strange picture from the Dutch Golden Age.
Goya and the Shakespeare witches
By the late eighteenth century witches had become a subject for the imagination. Goya painted them for a duke and duchess who enjoyed the macabre, and Fuseli took his from Macbeth. Neither man believed in witches. Both made them more frightening than anyone before.
5. Witches’ Flight
Francisco Goya, Witches’ Flight, 1798. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Goya painted six witchcraft scenes for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, and this is the most famous. Three witches in tall pointed hats lift a man into the dark, while below a peasant hides under a blanket and another man covers his ears. The pointed hats were those the Inquisition made the accused wear.
6. Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)
Francisco Goya, Witches’ Sabbath, 1797–98. Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.
From the same series: the devil as a huge he-goat crowned with oak leaves, receiving offerings from a circle of witches under a crescent moon. Bats wheel overhead. Goya is laughing at superstition here as much as painting it, and the result is still unsettling more than two hundred years later.
7. The Bewitched Man
Francisco Goya, The Bewitched Man, 1798. The National Gallery, London.
The third Goya comes from a play: a superstitious priest who believes he will die when his lamp goes out, and so keeps feeding it with oil. Behind him donkeys dance on their hind legs, and the devil holds the lamp. It is a joke about fear, painted with real fear in it.
8. The Three Witches
Henry Fuseli, The Three Witches, 1783. Kunsthaus Zürich.
Shakespeare’s weird sisters from Macbeth, pointing the same way as they wait for Macbeth on the heath. Fuseli lines up the three profiles like a frieze and lets their pointing hands do the rest. The image became so famous that it was engraved and copied across Europe, and it still shapes how the witches are staged today.
The enchantresses of myth
Older than any witch trial are the sorceresses of legend: Circe on her island, Medea with her potions, Morgan le Fay and Nimue at King Arthur’s court. Victorian painters loved them. They painted magic as beauty and danger at once.
9. Circé
Jean-Jules Badin, Circé, 1875. Private collection.
In the Odyssey Circe turns Ulysses’ sailors into pigs with a drugged cup. Badin, showing at the Paris Salon of 1875, paints her at the moment of the offer, calm and beautiful, the cup held out to us. We are the next guest.
10. Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses
John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, 1891. Gallery Oldham.
Waterhouse puts us in Ulysses’ place. Circe raises the cup towards us from her throne, and only in the round mirror behind her do we see him, wary, hand on sword. One of his men lies at her feet already changed.
11. Circe Invidiosa
John William Waterhouse, Circe Invidiosa, 1892. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Jealous Circe, from Ovid. She pours poison into the bay where the nymph Scylla bathes, and turns her rival into a monster. The water around her feet is already turning green. A tall, narrow canvas that suits a hallway or the space beside a door.
12. Medea
Frederick Sandys, Medea, 1866–68. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Sandys’ Medea brews a potion before a gold screen painted with Jason’s ship. She bites her lip and grips her coral beads, and toads and strange ingredients lie on the table before her. The Royal Academy turned it down in 1868; the outcry made it famous.
13. Morgan-le-Fay
Frederick Sandys, Morgan-le-Fay, 1864. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
King Arthur’s half-sister, weaving the poisoned robe she means to send him. Sandys dresses her in a leopard skin and sets a loom and a burning lamp behind her, and she steps towards us as if the spell were already cast.
14. The Beguiling of Merlin
Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin, 1872–77. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.
The great wizard undone by the woman he taught. Nimue reads from his own book of spells, and Merlin slumps into the hawthorn that will be his prison. Burne-Jones gave her the face of Maria Zambaco, the woman he loved, and it took him five years to finish.
The Victorian sorceress
In the 1880s the witch stepped into the Salon and the Royal Academy as a heroine: drawing a circle in the dust, casting a spell on a wax figure, combing her hair until a man is lost.
15. The Magic Circle
John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886. Tate, London.
The best-known witch painting in British art. A sorceress draws a protective circle around her cauldron with a wand, a sickle in her other hand and a snake around her neck. Inside the circle, smoke and fire; outside it, ravens, a toad and a bleak landscape. It was bought for the nation the year it was shown.
16. L’Envoûteuse (The Sorceress)
Georges Merle, L’Envoûteuse (The Sorceress), 1883. Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama.
An envoûteuse works magic on a person through a wax image of them. Merle gives his sorceress the full kit: wand, skull, candle and the little wax figure she is working on. It is the witch as a Salon heroine, and the most complete picture of a spell being cast that we know.
17. Lady Lilith
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1867. Watercolour and gouache. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lilith, in Jewish legend the first wife of Adam, who would not obey. Rossetti paints her combing her hair, and the poem he wrote for the picture warns that a man caught in it may never be freed. There is no cauldron here, only roses, a mirror and the most dangerous spell of all.
Goddesses, spirits and the horned witch
The last works are the strangest: Blake’s goddess of witchcraft, a witch summoned from a waterfall, and a pale woman in a horned headdress who has become one of the internet’s favourite witches.
18. The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (Hecate)
William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, c. 1795. Tate, London.
Usually called The Triple Hecate, after the goddess of witchcraft and crossroads. She crouches over an open book, with an owl, a bat and a grazing donkey around her. Blake printed it in colour and finished it by hand, and every copy is a little different.
19. Manfred and the Alpine Witch
John Martin, Manfred and the Alpine Witch, 1837.
From Byron’s poem Manfred: the hero summons the Witch of the Alps, and she rises in the rainbow beneath a waterfall. Martin, the painter of the sublime, makes the man tiny and the mountains enormous. Here magic is part of nature.
20. A Horned Witch
French School, A Horned Witch, 18th century. Private collection.
The most arresting witch image in our collection, and the most shared. A pale young woman looks out from under a veil and a tall horned headdress. Online she is often called a portrait of a real witch, but she is more likely a lady in costume for a masquerade, dressed as a sorceress for a night. Either way, she is the face of Halloween in art.
Common questions
What is the most famous witch painting?
John William Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886, Tate) is the best-known in British art. Goya’s Witches’ Flight (1798, Prado) and Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut The Witches (1510) are the most famous from earlier centuries.
Where does the image of the witch come from?
Much of it was fixed by artists between about 1500 and 1650: Baldung Grien and other German printmakers showed witches naked around steaming pots and riding goats, and Flemish painters set them in kitchens full of skulls and books. The pointed hat appears in Goya, echoing the caps the Inquisition made the accused wear.
Who were the enchantresses Victorian painters loved?
Circe from the Odyssey, Medea from the story of Jason, and Morgan le Fay and Nimue from the legends of King Arthur. Waterhouse, Sandys and Burne-Jones all painted them.
Can I buy a print of these witch paintings?
Yes. Every painting in this story is in Fable’s Masterworks collection and can be ordered as a print, prepared from its museum scan.
Witch paintings work on a wall because they are never only frightening. Each holds a story, and most of them hold a little humour or a lot of beauty too. Every work here can be ordered as a print just as it is, prepared from its museum scan. For more of the strange and the sublime, take our museum walk after hours. Buying a print keeps the selected catalogue artwork as prepared for print; neither is the purchase of the historical original.