Witches in Art History: From Witches’ Sabbaths to Sorcery
Witches have haunted the history of art for centuries.
Long before the familiar image of the pointed hat and broomstick became part of popular culture, artists imagined witches as necromancers, poison-makers, beautiful enchantresses, terrifying old women, supernatural beings and participants in mysterious nocturnal rituals.
Their appearance changed dramatically over time. In Renaissance and Baroque art, witchcraft was often connected with demons, death, forbidden magic and fears surrounding women who existed outside accepted social roles. By the nineteenth century, however, the witch had begun to transform. She could still be dangerous, but she could also be beautiful, independent, intelligent and powerful.
From Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien to Francisco Goya, Salvator Rosa and John William Waterhouse, these 15 works reveal how artists imagined witchcraft, sorcery and supernatural women across more than four centuries.
Two of the earliest works in this list are prints rather than paintings, but their influence on the visual history of witchcraft makes them impossible to leave out.
1. The Four Witches
Four nude women stand closely together beneath a mysterious suspended sphere. At their feet lie a skull and a human bone, while a horned demonic creature appears through an opening behind them.
Despite the title by which the engraving is now commonly known, exactly who these women are remains uncertain. They have been interpreted as witches, mythological figures, allegories and even variations on the classical Three Graces.
The occult interpretation is nevertheless difficult to ignore. The National Galleries of Scotland notes that the scene may show three witches initiating a younger woman, while the bones and lurking devil reinforce associations with magic and evil. National Galleries of Scotland
What makes Dürer's image particularly interesting is that his supposed witches are not grotesque old hags. Their bodies derive from classical ideals of beauty. Already, at the end of the fifteenth century, the witch could exist somewhere between attraction and danger.
It is also historically significant as the first engraving Dürer dated, with 1497 inscribed on the mysterious globe above the women.
2. The Witches
Few Renaissance artists were as fascinated by witches as Hans Baldung Grien.
In this extraordinary chiaroscuro woodcut, three nude women gather around a steaming vessel while another supernatural figure rises into the night above them. Clouds of smoke twist through the composition, transforming the ritual into something almost explosive.
Baldung had worked in Dürer's workshop only a few years earlier, but his treatment of witchcraft became considerably more explicit and unsettling.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the substance in the vessel as a "flying unguent," referring to the legendary ointments witches were believed to use to enable supernatural flight. The work appeared at a time when fear of witchcraft was particularly intense in German-speaking Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
There are several impressions of the print, some using gray tone and others orange-brown. The darker versions make the witches appear to materialize from the night itself, while the warmer ones give the scene an almost infernal glow.
Baldung helped establish many of the visual ideas that would return again and again in later witch art: nudity, ritual, smoke, flight and female bodies associated with forbidden knowledge.
3. Assembly of Witches
A century later, witchcraft becomes an entire miniature universe in Frans Francken II's Assembly of Witches.
Instead of focusing on a single witch, Francken fills the scene with magical activities, demons, strange creatures and ritual objects. Elegantly dressed women coexist with grotesque supernatural beings, while different acts of sorcery unfold throughout the painting.
The result feels almost like a cabinet of curiosities devoted to the occult.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which owns the work under the German title Hexenversammlung, describes it as an especially imaginative representation of the witches' sabbath. The museum also points to Francken's debt to the fantastic creatures of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. KHM
That influence is easy to see. There is so much happening that the eye constantly discovers another bizarre detail.
But the painting also reflects the anxieties of its period. The museum explicitly notes that the work mirrors misogynistic ideas and male fears circulating in contemporary writing about women and witchcraft. KHM
4. The Witches’ Kitchen
In David Teniers the Younger's The Witches' Kitchen, supernatural horror enters an unexpectedly domestic setting.
The scene resembles the Flemish genre interiors for which Teniers was famous, but ordinary household activity has been replaced by magic. Women occupy the interior alongside strange creatures and supernatural presences, turning the familiar kitchen into a place of ritual and transformation.
This mixture of everyday life and the impossible is part of what makes the painting so fascinating. Witchcraft does not take place in some remote mythological landscape. It happens beside the fireplace.
The original version we are referring to is the small oil-on-oak painting in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, dated around 1645–1650. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
This particular work is worth identifying carefully because numerous copies and variations circulate online. The Karlsruhe museum records old copies in Dresden and Poznań, as well as reversed versions derived from an engraving by Jacques Aliamet. Teniers also reused elements of the composition in other witch scenes. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
That repetition itself says something about the popularity of witch imagery in seventeenth-century collecting.
5. Witches at Their Incantations
Few paintings of witchcraft are as relentlessly macabre as Salvator Rosa's Witches at Their Incantations.
Under a nearly black sky, witches and monstrous figures perform a catalogue of forbidden rituals. A corpse hangs from a dead tree. One witch smokes the body while another figure cuts its toenails. Elsewhere, witches manipulate a wax effigy, stir a cauldron, exhume a skeleton and perform acts of necromancy.
On the far side of the composition, grotesque creatures emerge from the darkness.
The National Gallery describes the painting as evoking a witches' sabbath and dates it to around 1646, when Rosa was living in Florence and developing a strong interest in supernatural and occult subjects. National Gallery
What is especially striking is how theatrical the painting feels. Figures are arranged almost across a stage, with isolated pools of light revealing one horrifying episode after another.
According to the National Gallery, Rosa may even have used that theatrical quality deliberately. The painting reportedly hung behind a curtain in the home of its early owner so that it could be suddenly revealed to visitors. National Gallery
6. The Witch
Rosa returned to witchcraft repeatedly, but The Witch transforms the subject completely.
Instead of an entire sabbath, one monumental woman dominates the canvas.
She kneels against a dark background, her body twisted with age and fury. In one hand she raises a burning branch. In the other she holds a spherical vessel from which a small demonic figure emerges.
Around her lie a skull, bones, coins, a mirror and a sheet covered with esoteric symbols. Behind her, almost disappearing into the shadows, is the disturbing figure of a swaddled child.
The painting dates from around 1647–1650 and entered the collection of the Uffizi Galleries in 2024. Gallerie degli Uffizi
Unlike many later romanticized witches, Rosa's figure is deliberately uncomfortable to look at. She is neither seductive nor mysterious. She appears powerful precisely because she has been stripped of conventional beauty.
The enormous scale of the painting, 212 × 147 cm, makes this even more unusual. A subject often confined to small cabinet paintings has been given the dimensions and visual authority of a major history painting.
7. The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches
With Henry Fuseli, witchcraft moves from the ritual chamber into the realm of nightmare.
Painted in 1796, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches was inspired by a passage in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton describes the terrifying Night-Hag flying through the air to join witches in Lapland, accompanied by imagery of darkness, magic and blood.
Fuseli turned that literary reference into a feverish supernatural vision.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies the Night-Hag with Hecate, the ancient goddess associated with witchcraft and magical rites. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bodies appear suspended between flight, dance and torment. Nothing feels completely anchored to the physical world.
This is characteristic of Fuseli. He was less interested in documenting what a witch's ritual might supposedly look like than in capturing the psychological sensation of terror.
The result belongs to the same disturbing imaginative world as his famous Nightmare: irrational, theatrical and strangely hypnotic.
8. Witches’ Sabbath
At the center of Goya's Witches' Sabbath sits an enormous black goat.
Around him, a circle of witches gathers beneath the moon. Children are presented as offerings, while bats and other nocturnal forms hover in the darkness.
The painting formed part of a group of six works involving witchcraft that Goya created for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna's country estate near Madrid. The Museo Lázaro Galdiano dates it to 1797–1798. Museo Lázaro Galdiano
Yet Goya's witches are more complicated than they first appear.
The scene is terrifying, but the painting is generally understood within Goya's wider criticism of superstition and irrational belief. The Museo Lázaro Galdiano describes the series as a satirical critique of superstition associated with the enlightened social circles to which both Goya and his patrons belonged. Museo Lázaro Galdiano
The viewer is therefore confronted not simply with witchcraft, but with something more ambiguous: an image of the frightening things human beings are capable of believing.
9. Witches’ Flight
Goya's Witches' Flight is even stranger.
Three bare-chested figures wearing tall pointed caps float in the darkness while holding another naked figure in the air. Beneath them, one man desperately covers his ears and another flees with his head hidden beneath a cloth. A donkey watches from the shadows.
There is almost no landscape. Everything important happens inside an oppressive field of darkness.
The painting belonged to the same six-work witchcraft series created for the Osuna family. Today it is in the Museo del Prado. Museo del Prado
Unlike the traditional witches' sabbath, however, there is no obvious narrative to explain exactly what we are seeing. The pointed caps suggest associations with punishment, ignorance and the Spanish Inquisition as much as supernatural magic.
That uncertainty is precisely what makes the painting so effective.
Goya's witches exist somewhere between folklore and psychological nightmare. They are frightening not because we understand them, but because we don't.
10. The Beguiling of Merlin
By the late nineteenth century, the image of the witch had begun to change dramatically.
In Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin there are no demons, cauldrons or corpses. Instead we encounter Nimue, an enchantress from Arthurian legend.
According to the story, Merlin falls in love with her and teaches her his magical knowledge. Nimue then uses that knowledge to trap the great sorcerer himself.
Burne-Jones shows the moment of reversal. Merlin appears exhausted and almost absorbed by the tangled hawthorn, while Nimue stands before him calmly reading from a book of spells. Smart History
The supernatural woman is no longer represented as an ugly servant of the Devil. She is beautiful, composed and intellectually powerful.
And that shift matters.
The witch and enchantress increasingly became figures through which Victorian artists could explore fears and fascination surrounding female sexuality, knowledge and independence. What earlier centuries had represented primarily as grotesque evil was becoming something much more seductive and psychologically complex. Art UK
11. Witches Going to Their Sabbath
Luis Ricardo Falero takes one of the oldest subjects in witch imagery, the flight to the sabbath, and transforms it into a spectacular nineteenth-century fantasy.
Witches whirl through the moonlit sky in a spiral of bodies, animals and supernatural creatures. A goat, bats and other traditional symbols of witchcraft accompany them as they rush through the night.
Unlike the dark brutality of Rosa or the unsettling ambiguity of Goya, Falero's witches are deliberately sensual.
The painting, dated 1878, is currently recorded in a private collection. Wikipedia
Falero's vision reflects the nineteenth century's growing fascination with occultism and esoteric subjects, but it also reveals just how dramatically the witch's image had changed.
The terrifying old witch still appears, but she now shares the sky with idealized young women whose supernatural power is inseparable from erotic attraction.
The witches' sabbath has become spectacle.
12. The Magic Circle
Few works capture the modern romantic image of the witch as perfectly as John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle.
A solitary sorceress stands beside a smoking cauldron, using a wand to draw a circle around herself. Ravens gather beyond its edge while the barren landscape creates a feeling of isolation.
Yet she does not appear frightened.
She controls the ritual, the space and the objects around her.
Painted in 1886, The Magic Circle was exhibited at the Royal Academy that year and entered what is now the Tate collection through the Chantrey Bequest. Wikipedia
The painting marks an extraordinary distance from the witches of Dürer, Baldung or Rosa.
Waterhouse's sorceress is still mysterious, but she is not presented merely as grotesque or evil. The focus is on her concentration and authority.
Here, magic has become a form of knowledge.
That image of the self-contained, powerful witch feels remarkably close to the way the figure would later be reclaimed in twentieth and twenty-first-century popular culture.
13. Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses
Five years later, Waterhouse turned to one of mythology's most famous enchantresses.
In Homer's Odyssey, Circe uses magical potions to transform Odysseus's companions into animals. Waterhouse shows her offering the enchanted cup directly toward Ulysses.
But compositionally, she offers it toward us as well.
Circe sits frontally on her throne, meeting the viewer with extraordinary confidence. Behind her, a great circular mirror reflects Ulysses approaching, while transformed animals and magical objects remind us of her supernatural abilities.
The painting was completed in 1891 and is now in the collection of Gallery Oldham. Art UK
Circe is not technically a witch in the early modern European sense. She is a classical sorceress.
Yet her importance to the history of witch imagery is enormous. Figures such as Circe offered nineteenth-century artists an ancient model for the dangerous woman whose intelligence, sexuality and magical knowledge gave her power over men.
Waterhouse does not show her hiding in darkness. He gives her the throne.
14. A Witch
If Waterhouse's witches are calm and self-possessed, Edgar Bundy's A Witch is almost pure movement.
The woman rushes through a dark forest with her body bent forward, her clothing caught in the motion around her. Black birds fill the branches and air, while her expression gives the scene an almost feverish intensity.
Painted in 1896, the large oil on canvas was exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year. Sotheby's
Bundy's witch feels surprisingly cinematic. There is no carefully arranged ritual and no elegant Victorian interior. She seems wild, uncontrolled and inseparable from the landscape surrounding her.
There may also have been a contemporary political dimension to the painting. Sotheby's notes that it was created only a year after the highly publicized 1895 killing of Bridget Cleary in Ireland, whose family accused her of being a supernatural changeling. The catalogue suggests that contemporary British viewers might have connected Bundy's image with the case and wider political debates of the period, although this interpretation remains speculative rather than certain. Sotheby's
15. The Love Potion
The final work brings us to perhaps the most modern witch of all.
In Evelyn De Morgan's The Love Potion, a richly dressed woman sits at a table mixing a potion. Books fill the space beside her, including a volume associated with Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician and alchemist. Through the window behind her, a pair of lovers can be seen in the distance.
At first glance, the woman seems to belong perfectly to the tradition of the beautiful sorceress.
Yet the De Morgan Foundation cautions that the figure has often been too simply categorized as a wicked fairy-tale witch. Earlier interpretations described her as deliberately creating a potion to interfere with the lovers, but the painting leaves considerably more room for ambiguity. demorgan.org.uk
That ambiguity is what makes the work such an appropriate ending to this history.
The woman is surrounded by books, knowledge and experimentation. Her magic resembles scholarship almost as much as sorcery.
The witch has moved a very long way from the demonic figure hidden behind Dürer's four women in 1497.
From Fear to Fascination
Across these four centuries, the witch constantly changes shape.
In Renaissance prints by Dürer and Baldung, she emerges from a culture increasingly preoccupied with sorcery and female transgression. In the seventeenth-century worlds of Francken, Teniers and Salvator Rosa, witchcraft becomes grotesque spectacle, populated by demons, corpses, spells and impossible creatures.
Then something begins to change.
Fuseli and Goya move witchcraft into the territory of nightmare and psychology. By the nineteenth century, Burne-Jones, Falero, Waterhouse and De Morgan increasingly transform the witch into an enchantress: beautiful, educated, mysterious and capable of controlling forces that others cannot.
That evolution may explain why witches remain such powerful figures in art and popular culture today.
They have represented fear and superstition, but also forbidden knowledge. They can embody danger, sexuality, independence, rebellion, age, wisdom or power.
And perhaps that is why the witch has never really disappeared from art.
She simply keeps changing.
