Nobody who painted a witch had ever seen one. Painters worked from trial records, plays and older prints, and they never agreed on her face: a toothless hag for some, a young beauty for others. On one canvas here, the painter's own sister and the picture's present owners still read the same woman in opposite ways.
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How These Were Chosen
The witch of Western art was born with the witch hunts. Painters pictured what the accused were said to do in secret, and the same props came back each time: a cauldron over a fire, a broom, a goat, a black cat and a moon.
The subject also gave them a rare freedom. A witch scene let an artist paint nudes, night, fire and monsters in a single picture, and from the 1600s on, private collectors ordered such scenes for their own rooms.
The twelve works here were chosen for how they picture the witch at work, at her pot, in flight or on trial, from small prints of around 1500 to canvases of the early 1900s. Two are prints, kept because painters went on borrowing from them.
12. Evelyn De Morgan, The Love Potion (1903)
In a heavy gold-yellow gown, a woman sits beside an open window and tilts a small flask over a goblet, letting a thin red stream run into the cup. A black cat lies on the floorboards at her feet, a row of old bound books fills the low shelf beside her, and far off through the window a couple embraces on a terrace. Evelyn De Morgan signed and dated the canvas in 1903, and the two parties closest to it have read the woman in opposite ways.
The first reading came from the painter's own family. Mrs. Stirling, De Morgan's sister, wrote a catalog of the De Morgan collection of pictures and pottery, and in it she described "a witch in bright yellow, with a callous, cruel face, mixing a potion to upset the lovers who are seen on the terrace in the distance." The volumes on the shelf were, for her, "books upon Black Magic."
The second reading comes from the De Morgan Foundation, which owns the picture today. It calls Mrs. Stirling's description a mistake and sees a learned alchemist at work in a bright study. Its evidence sits on the very shelf the sister described.
De Morgan lettered most of the spines herself, so the titles can still be read. Mrs. Stirling named only one, the volume marked "Paracelsus," after the Renaissance physician and alchemist. One volume away stands Agrippa von Nettesheim, the sixteenth-century physician who wrote De occulta philosophia, and right beside him Iamblichus, a Neoplatonist philosopher.
To my eye, those books favor the Foundation. A woman reading Agrippa and Iamblichus looks more like a student of hidden knowledge than the cruel matchbreaker of the sister's catalog. The Foundation goes further still and reads even the black cat at her feet as a play on the old stereotype of the diabolical sorceress.
At a Glance
Artist: Evelyn De Morgan (1855 to 1919)
Painted: 1903
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 104.1 × 52.1 cm (41 × 20.5 in)
Where to see it: De Morgan Foundation, shown at Cannon Hall in Barnsley, Watts Gallery and Wightwick Manor
11. John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891)
Circe holds a shallow cup straight out toward the viewer, her other arm raising a long wand above her head. She is the sorceress of Homer's Odyssey, set by John William Waterhouse in 1891 on a gilded throne, with a black boar lying at its foot. In the round mirror behind her, a bearded man is walking in. He is Ulysses, and his sailors have already drunk from that cup. None of them is still a man.