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Art Guides · Magic & Witchcraft
20 Famous Witch Paintings: Magic, Spells and Sorceresses
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Log in or sign upA cup offered to a stranger. A circle traced in dust. A book that can trap the magician who taught its secrets. In famous witch paintings, power often enters through an ordinary object before the scene becomes impossible.
These 20 paintings follow magic through Renaissance landscapes, Baroque nightmares, Goya’s satire and the sorceresses of Victorian art. Some show witches as feared outsiders. Others give enchantresses the power to help, transform, imprison or take revenge. The differences are what make the subject worth looking at closely.
What are witchcraft paintings?
Witchcraft paintings depict imagined witches, spells, supernatural gatherings or people thought to possess magical powers. The wider subject of magic in art also includes classical sorceresses such as Circe and Medea, biblical necromancy and Arthurian enchantresses. These figures do not all belong to the same religion, period or tradition.
A painting can tell us how people pictured witchcraft without proving that the pictured ritual ever happened. Stories of dangerous women, demonic meetings and supernatural harm grew through texts, theatre, images and accusations. Historical witch persecution gives that imagery a serious context: fantastic scenes could draw on prejudices that harmed real people.
The selection below is an editorial route through the subject, not a measured popularity ranking. It concentrates on paintings. Famous witch images by Dürer and Hans Baldung also matter, but their engravings and woodcuts are different media.
All 20 paintings at a glance
1. The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse
Explore the artistJohn William Waterhouse →
A woman drags a long wand through the earth. Beside her, a cauldron sends up a column of pale smoke. Black birds wait around the edge, but the central figure keeps her attention on the line she is making. Waterhouse gives the ritual the concentration of skilled work.
The boundary matters more than a spectacular apparition. Her body, the staff and the rising smoke organise an otherwise rough, open landscape. A curved blade hangs from her other hand; flowers are tucked into her belt. These details suggest a practice assembled from several visual traditions rather than a portrait of one identifiable historical witch.
The painting leaves the purpose of the ceremony unresolved. We can see the preparation and the protected space, but Waterhouse does not show us what, if anything, will answer. That withheld result is part of its appeal.
Collection and research reference: Tate, London.
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The Magic Circle, painted by hand
John William Waterhouse · oil on canvas, made to order
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2. Witches’ Sabbath by Francisco de Goya
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The goat sits upright, its horns crowned with leaves. Around it, women cluster with children whose bodies range from lively to terribly frail. Goya borrows the imagined ceremony of the witches’ sabbath and makes it feel both absurd and horrifying.
This small canvas belonged to the group of witchcraft pictures made for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna in 1798. It belongs in the world of invented terrors, superstition and elite conversation about them. It is not evidence that such a ceremony took place.
Keep the date in mind. This is the painting in the Lázaro Galdiano collection, not the broad, late Black Painting in the Prado. We return to that second version at the end of the guide.
Collection and research reference: Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.
OWN IT.Witches’ Sabbath (El Aquelarre) by Francisco De Goya, painted by hand $299.00
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Witches’ Sabbath (El Aquelarre) by Francisco De Goya, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 3. Witches’ Flight by Francisco de Goya
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Three figures wearing tall, decorated caps lift a naked man into an empty night sky. Their mouths approach his body, turning the group into a disturbing knot of support and assault. Beneath them, one man hides under a white cloth while another presses himself against the ground.
The Prado connects the fleeing figure’s hand gesture with protection against the evil eye. A donkey stands to the right, adding another stubbornly earthly presence to the fantastic scene. Goya makes the reactions below as strange as the supposed miracle above.
The picture asks us to notice how fear moves through a scene. Looking away does not make the danger disappear, but neither does staring at the impossible give us a secure explanation.
Collection and research reference: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
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Witches' Flight, painted by hand
Francisco De Goya · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 4. Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses by John William Waterhouse
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The cup is coming towards us. Circe sits high on a throne, one arm extended with the drink and the other lifted with her wand. The direct offer puts the viewer in the uncomfortable position of the guest who has to decide whether to trust her.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe transforms Odysseus’s companions into swine; Odysseus is the Greek name of the hero also called Ulysses. Waterhouse builds his scene around the encounter between the sorceress and the resistant visitor. The mirror behind her shows the man whom the painting otherwise keeps outside our view.
Look down after looking at her face. A pig beside the throne makes the danger of the beautiful cup concrete. Hospitality has become a means of control.
Collection and research reference: Gallery Oldham.
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Circe offering the Cup to Ulysses, painted by hand
John William Waterhouse · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 5. Circe Invidiosa by John William Waterhouse
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Circe pours the contents of a wide bowl into water that almost matches her dress. The long vertical canvas makes her look both remote and dangerously close. Beneath her, disturbed forms break the surface.
The story comes from Ovid’s account of Glaucus, Scylla and Circe. When Glaucus seeks help to win Scylla, Circe desires him herself. Rejected, she poisons the bathing place of her rival. The Latin title points to envy, and the painting shows it taking physical form.
This is a different Circe from the enthroned host of the previous painting. No guest faces her. The spell travels through a place someone else will enter later, which makes the quiet concentration more threatening than an open confrontation.
Collection and research reference: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
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Circe Invidiosa, painted by hand
John William Waterhouse · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 6. Medea by Frederick Sandys
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Medea’s mouth is slightly open and her eyes look beyond the table. One hand draws towards her chest; the other tips a vessel above a flame. Below that anxious face lies a remarkably crowded arrangement of shells, cord, plants and a toad.
Birmingham’s account identifies the action with the spell against the robe intended for Jason’s new bride. Sandys chooses preparation over the later catastrophe. Medea remains a thinking, distressed person even as the work before her takes on a lethal purpose.
The gold background brings the voyage of the Argonauts into the same space as her ritual. The ship recalls the adventure in which Jason depended on her help. Past service and present betrayal press against one another behind her head.
Collection and research reference: Birmingham Museums.
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Medea by Frederick Sandys, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 7. Morgan le Fay by Frederick Sandys
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Everything seems to compete for space: green sleeves, gold fabric, purple drapery, patterned walls and the apparatus of the spell. Sandys makes enchantment look material. It requires a room, equipment and a body reaching across a work surface.
Morgan belongs to the stories of King Arthur, where her abilities and loyalties vary between texts. In this painting she is associated with the enchantment of a garment meant to destroy Arthur. The destructive object is clothing, bringing magic into the familiar acts of making and dressing.
Compare the strained reach here with Medea’s inward gesture in Sandys’s other painting. Both women work through objects, but their bodies tell different stories. Morgan occupies her chamber with an expansive, almost commanding movement.
Collection and research reference: Birmingham Museums.
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Morgan le Fay by Frederick Sandys, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 8. The Love Potion by Evelyn De Morgan
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A thin stream of liquid passes from a little vessel into a goblet. The woman’s hands are steady, her gold dress fills much of the room, and a black cat looks out from the floor. Beyond the opening behind her, a couple embrace.
An older description by the artist’s sister called this a cruel witch preparing to interfere with the lovers. The De Morgan Foundation questions that inherited characterisation. The image does not settle who will drink the potion or establish the woman’s intention.
Books, including a volume bearing the name Paracelsus, give the room the character of a place of study. It is worth allowing that knowledge to remain part of the picture. A woman beside a black cat need not be reduced to a ready-made villain.
Collection and research reference: De Morgan Collection.
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The Love Potion, painted by hand
Evelyn De Morgan · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 9. Melissa, also called Circe by Dosso Dossi
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A magnificent figure sits within a marked circle, holding a tablet and a torch. Armour lies nearby, a large dog looks towards us, and small human forms hang from a tree. At first, the abundance of objects makes the scene difficult to read.
The Borghese identifies the woman as Melissa from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, rather than simply Circe. Melissa helps free knights from another enchantress’s transformations. Here magic can reverse captivity instead of causing it.
The museum’s technical research adds a further complication: the dog covers an earlier painted armoured figure. The composition changed as Dosso worked. That discovery is more useful than assigning a fixed secret meaning to every object. The painting itself developed through choices and revisions.
Collection and research reference: Galleria Borghese, Rome.
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Circe (or Melissa), painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 10. Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape by Dosso Dossi
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The enchantress is almost lost in a landscape large enough to wander through. A road passes into the distance; trees gather around a pale building. Nearer to us, animals assemble beside the seated woman and her open book.
The title identifies them as Circe’s lovers. Their attention helps turn a pastoral gathering into a scene of transformation. The woman holds a tablet, making her power a matter of reading and signs as well as physical beauty.
Dosso allows the setting to carry much of the spell. There is no violent clash to tell us when ordinary nature ends and enchantment begins. The animals, the reader and the dense growth seem to occupy the same continuous world.
Collection and research reference: National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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Circe and her Lovers in a Landscape, painted by hand
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The eye has trouble resting here. A hanged body occupies the centre, while other figures work with an effigy, a cauldron and the dead. At the sides, monsters and further ceremonies extend the nightmare beyond the main group.
Rosa paints a gathering of imagined horrors with the breadth of a theatrical set. The National Gallery records a particularly apt detail from a letter: the picture could be kept behind a curtain and dramatically revealed. Surprise was part of its life as an object.
The setting should not be mistaken for a record of a real witches’ meeting. Its fascination lies in an artist and his collectors arranging the forbidden into something they could study, discuss and display.
Collection and research reference: National Gallery, London.
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Witches at their Incantations by Salvator Rosa, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 12. Saul and the Witch of Endor by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen
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King Saul seeks an answer from the dead. The biblical story tells how he visits a woman at Endor to summon the prophet Samuel before battle. Samuel’s message brings judgment rather than reassurance.
Van Oostsanen expands the episode into a crowded field of sorcery, strange creatures and ritual action. A viewer looking only for the king can miss how much of the picture belongs to the wider imagined world around his consultation.
The Rijksmuseum notes the unusually precise inscribed date, 29 November 1526. This is an early example of a biblical subject being combined with contemporary images of witchcraft. It shows how painters could reshape an old narrative through the fears and visual habits of their own time.
Collection and research reference: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
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Saul and the Witch of Endor, painted by hand
Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 13. The Three Witches by Henry Fuseli
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Three profiles advance in a tight sequence. The pointing hands repeat the movement of the faces, so the group feels coordinated before we know what it is indicating. Fuseli gives Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters the intensity of a sudden apparition.
The subject comes from Macbeth’s first encounter with the witches and their prophecies. The Kunsthaus also identifies the death’s-head hawkmoth in the background as an ominous detail. The prediction matters because of what Macbeth will do with it.
Fuseli painted more than one version of this composition. The example shown here belongs to the Kunsthaus Zürich and dates to 1783. Its compact, overlapping figures are different from a wide scene of witches gathered around a cauldron.
Collection and research reference: Kunsthaus Zürich.
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The Three Witches, painted by hand
Henry Fuseli · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 14. The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne-Jones
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Merlin is already losing the freedom that his knowledge ought to protect. He leans within a hawthorn tree while Nimue stands with a book. Their faces draw close, yet the branches and the book make the relationship unequal.
The Arthurian subject concerns the enchantress learning Merlin’s magic and using it to bind him. Burne-Jones slows the event into an encounter between looking and reading. Her attention belongs partly to the words; his is fixed on her.
The flowers make the trap unexpectedly beautiful. Rather than surrounding a witch with obviously sinister equipment, the painter lets an attractive woodland become the instrument of confinement. The result sits uneasily between intimacy and loss of control.
Collection and research reference: Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.
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The Beguiling of Merlin, painted by hand
Edward Burne-Jones · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 15. Macbeth and the Witches by Albert Pinkham Ryder
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Where Fuseli compresses the witches into hard profiles, Ryder lets them drift across the sky. The mounted figures below are small and unstable in the dark landscape. It feels difficult to tell whether the weather is producing the apparition or the apparition is changing the weather.
The Phillips Collection connects the painting with Act I, Scene 3 of Macbeth. Its dating, after the mid-1890s, reflects Ryder’s prolonged working methods rather than a securely fixed single year.
The picture offers little of the ritual equipment seen elsewhere in this guide. Sorcery becomes atmosphere. That shift makes the humans seem vulnerable before any specific threat has been explained.
Collection and research reference: The Phillips Collection, Washington.
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Macbeth and the Witches, painted by hand
Albert Pinkham Ryder · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 16. The Bewitched Man, or The Devil’s Lamp by Francisco de Goya
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The flame is small; the terror is enormous. A man bends forward to keep a strange lamp supplied with oil. His open eyes and awkward posture make him look as though a household task has become a matter of survival.
The National Gallery gives the fuller title A Scene from El Hechizado por Fuerza, or The Forcibly Bewitched. In Antonio de Zamora’s comedy, Don Claudio is tricked into believing that he will die when the lamp goes out. Goya’s supposed supernatural scene is therefore also a joke about credulity.
This distinction changes how we look at the picture. We are not simply watching a demon threaten a victim. We are watching fear make a person obedient to an absurd condition.
Collection and research reference: National Gallery, London.
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The Bewitched Man by Francisco de Goya, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 17. Medea by Evelyn De Morgan
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This Medea has left the workbench. She moves through an elaborate interior, holding a vessel while her long robe folds across the patterned floor. Architecture gives her a controlled setting, but her face and the burden in her hand keep the scene unsettled.
The National Trust’s record of a related study documents the finished oil painting in Birkenhead and its exhibition with lines from William Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason. Those lines describe the return of Medea’s sorcery as her happiness collapses.
De Morgan gives betrayal room to register before the familiar violence of the myth. Compared with Sandys’s close, crowded preparation, this is a more solitary image. The vessel carries the possibility of harm through a room that appears almost too orderly to contain it.
Collection and research reference: Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead.
OWN IT.Medea by Evelyn De Morgan, painted by hand $299.00
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Medea by Evelyn De Morgan, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 18. Medea About to Kill Her Children by Eugène Delacroix
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In Delacroix’s version, the story has reached a terrible threshold. Medea grips her children while a dagger makes her intention visible. Her turned head suggests that the outside world remains close, even inside the shelter of the rock.
This is a painting of a sorceress, but the visible subject is not a magical rite. Its place here is the consequence of the myth: the same Medea who enabled Jason’s success can become the agent of its destruction. The distinction matters when searching for witchcraft paintings. Not every picture of a magical character shows magic in action.
The tightly held bodies create the conflict. Her arms contain the children, while their movements resist her. Delacroix makes the human catastrophe fill the space that other painters give to bowls, books and spells.
Collection and research reference: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille.
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Medea about to Kill her Children, painted by hand
Eugene Delacroix · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 19. Tilla Durieux as Circe by Franz von Stuck
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Circe has become an actress. The Berlin museum identifies the sitter as Tilla Durieux, whose performance in a Calderón play provided the setting for this portrait. Stuck worked with posed photographs, bringing theatrical preparation into the making of the painted sorceress.
A dark background leaves the profile, bare shoulder and extended bowl unusually exposed. Unlike Waterhouse’s Circe, this figure needs no throne or mirror. The offer is concentrated into the angle of her body and the reach of her hand.
The painting reveals another route by which witches and enchantresses entered modern art: performance. A mythological power could be worn as a role, photographed in a studio and transformed into a portrait of a contemporary woman.
Collection and research reference: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
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Tilla Durieux as Circe, painted by hand
Franz von Stuck · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 20. Witches’ Sabbath, or The Great He-Goat by Francisco de Goya
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The goat is now a dark, heavy silhouette. Before it sits a crowd whose faces catch the light unevenly. Individual expressions emerge and sink back into the group, while a more isolated seated figure occupies the far right.
Unlike the small 1798 canvas near the start of this guide, this work was painted on a wall in Goya’s house, the Quinta del Sordo. It belongs to the group known as the Black Paintings and was later transferred to canvas.
The change of scale alters the encounter. We are no longer peering into a little fantastical scene: the assembly spreads across a wall. Readings of fear, submission and collective irrationality are compelling, but they remain interpretations. Goya left no explanation that resolves every face into a single meaning.
Collection and research reference: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
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The Great He-Goat by Francisco de Goya, painted by hand
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The same object can do different work in different paintings. Compare its position, the figure’s action and the literary source before deciding what it means.
- Circles and boundaries
- In Waterhouse, the line separates a working space from the birds outside. In Dosso’s Melissa, a marked circle belongs to an enchantress associated with release from a spell. Neither image supplies a universal diagram of magic.
- Cups, bowls and small vessels
- Circe offers a drink, De Morgan’s seated figure transfers liquid, and Medea carries a vessel through a palace. The action around the container tells us more than its shape alone.
- Animals and transformed bodies
- The pig beside Circe’s throne refers to the fate of Ulysses’s companions. A black cat in The Love Potion belongs to a different visual tradition. Animals need to be read within their own story.
- Books and acts of reading
- Written knowledge can belong to the person who learns a spell, the person who loses control of it or a figure absorbed in study. In The Beguiling of Merlin, the book helps shift authority from teacher to pupil.
Questions about witches and magic in art
What is the famous painting of a witch with a cauldron?
John William Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886) shows a woman drawing a boundary around a smoking cauldron. It belongs to Tate’s collection. The painting leaves the purpose and result of her ceremony open.
Did Goya paint more than one Witches’ Sabbath?
Yes. The small oil painting of 1798 belongs to the Museo Lázaro Galdiano. The much wider Witches’ Sabbath, or The Great He-Goat, dates to 1820 to 1823 and belongs to the Prado. The latter was painted on a wall before being transferred to canvas.
Are Circe and Medea witches?
They are sorceresses from Greek myth. “Witch paintings” is often used as a broad search term for their images, but their stories differ from early modern European accusations of witchcraft. Circe is associated with transformation; Medea uses magical knowledge in the story of Jason and its aftermath.
Why are cats, books and cups common in paintings of magic?
These objects give an invisible power something visible to work through. A cup can carry a potion, a book can hold knowledge and an animal can suggest transformation or a familiar. Their meaning depends on the particular work: a black cat alone does not establish a figure’s identity or motive.
Do these paintings show real witchcraft rituals?
They should not be read as straightforward evidence of real ceremonies. Many are based on literature, theatre, satire or the artist’s imagination. Even when an image draws on historical beliefs, it shows a representation shaped for viewers rather than an impartial record.
Which witchcraft paintings were made by women?
Evelyn De Morgan’s The Love Potion (1903) and Medea (1889) are two examples in this guide. They reward comparison with works by male artists because their subjects’ concentration, distress and knowledge can complicate familiar assumptions about the dangerous enchantress.
Where can I find hand-painted reproductions of these subjects?
Explore ByMuseum’s Magic and Witchcraft Paintings collection for available reproductions and individual size and framing options.
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Log in or sign upSources and further reading
Direct collection references appear beneath each painting. For broader context and comparisons:
- British Museum: Prints of darkness, for the wider history of witch imagery in prints.
- Smarthistory: The Beguiling of Merlin, for the Arthurian subject and composition.
- De Morgan Foundation: The Love Potion, for the uncertainty surrounding the woman’s identity and purpose.
- The Huntington: another version of Fuseli’s Three Witches, for comparison with the 1783 Zürich painting.
- The Met: Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait, the source for the artist portrait used here.
Dates and media follow the cited records. Approximate dates remain approximate. Collection names identify holdings rather than guaranteeing that a work is currently on display. Painting images are historical works in the public domain; source and collection credits are retained in the image records.
