Witches in British Art
From Shakespeare's "Macbeth" to the Pre-Raphaelites, the transformation of the witch in British art and visual culture.
“You needed at least three witches for a coven. Two witches was just an argument.”
-Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
Three witches hover before a boiling cauldron.
The night is blacker than a crow’s wings, colder than a lover’s curse, but the witches embrace the brewing storm as they weave an eerie spell.
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poisoned entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweltered venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’th’ charmèd pot.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.1
Of all the ghosts, fairies, and sundry creatures who populate William Shakespeare’s repertoire, none loom so large this time of year as the Three Witches of Macbeth. It is not surprising that eighteenth-century English painter Daniel Gardner would choose the Weird Sisters as subject matter for his work. After all, Shakespeare’s plays enjoyed a major resurgence in popularity during the late 1700s, and thanks to the burgeoning Romantic movement, the occult allure of Macbeth’s witches were hard for audiences to resist.
What is surprising? Gardner’s witches are beautiful.
Shakespeare describes the Three Witches as androgynous hags. The landscape in which they appear before Macbeth is a stormy “wasteland,” the kind of windswept heath that would later be immortalized by the Romantics. Or as Macbeth famously observes, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”2 When the witches materialize, Banquo adds:
… What are these,
So withered and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth,
And yet are on’t? — Live you? Or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips. You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.3
Gardner’s witches couldn’t be further from Banquo’s description. The witches in his 1775 painting (above) are not only beautiful, but stylish. Clearly, they belong to the upper echelons of society. But who are they?
On the furthest left is Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne, and to her immediate right is Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (also a member of the Spencer family and an ancestor of Princess Diana). On the far right of the composition is the sculptor and author Anne Seymour Damer.
The Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Melbourne were extremely influential, if not notorious women. (The 2008 Keira Knightley film The Duchess is based on Georgiana’s life.) Georgiana and Elizabeth were powerful political operatives who supported the Whig Party;4 Georgiana often hosted political dinners at her estate, and they both campaigned for Whig candidates in a time when such activism from women was far less accepted.
Their friend Anne Seymour Damer frequently exhibited her art at the Royal Academy, carving her own path in a male-dominated field, and she grew passionate about politics and travel. Escapades included journeying alone through revolutionary France, befriending Napoleon and Josephine Buonaparte, being captured (and released, unharmed) by privateers, and making art until the day she died at 79 years old. Hers was a life of adventure.
The fact that these three friends would choose to portray themselves as witches demonstrates a delightful awareness of their positions in society: they were powerful women, defying the rigid gender roles of their time, and stirring the political pot as Shakespeare’s witches did in Macbeth. What makes this painting all the more remarkable is that less than sixty years before it was created, England’s last witch trials were held in Leicester.
A prevalent misconception about witch trials is that they were common during the Middle Ages. In fact, medieval Europeans held more ambivalent views toward folk magic and “occult sciences” than one may assume.5 This association between witch trials and the Middle Ages may have been popularized by Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which features a scene that satirizes the ridiculousness of the trials.
In reality, witch trials were largely a phenomenon of the early modern period, particularly after the Protestant Reformation. Religious conflict, the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, famine, disease—the turbulence of the era provided the perfect backdrop for ordinary people to turn on vulnerable members of their communities.
Of the roughly 100,000 people who were put on trial for witchcraft across Europe from 1400 to the early 1700s, about half were executed, and 80% of the victims were women. Most female victims were working class and over the age of 40, and those who stood outside of patriarchal norms, particularly those who never married or never had children, were potent targets.
In England and Scotland, beliefs surrounding witches took on a distinctly anti-Catholic flavor. On one end of the spectrum, Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) documents his contemporaries’ magical beliefs—despite its title, the book argues that court magicians were con artists, witch trials were irrational displays that preyed upon the poor, and the Catholic Church was to blame for spreading superstition:
I will prove all Popish Charms, Conjurations, Exorcisms, Benedictions and Curses, not only to be ridiculous, and of none effect, but also to be impious and contrary to God’s Word… I doubt not, but use the matter so, that as well the Massemonger for his part, as the Witchmonger for his, shall both be ashamed of their Professions.6
On the other end of the spectrum were those who fervently believed in witchcraft. Possibly in response to Reginald Scot’s book, King James VI of Scotland (who would later become James I of England) published Daemonologie in 1597; the book implicitly refutes Scot’s skepticism and argues that witches are very much real. It was an influential endorsement of witch hunting, one that would inspire William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Shakespeare wrote the play after James ascended the English throne, and many historians believe that Macbeth was intended as a “thank you” for James’ patronage.7
The witch trials of Scotland, some of the most infamous in Europe, were partially aimed at those with lingering Catholic sympathies. The Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563 suggests a connection between “witchcrafts, sorcery, and necromancy” and Catholicism—ironically, the main accusation being that Catholics trafficked in vain superstitions.8
The imagery that we associate with Western witches today—black clothing, black hats, broomsticks—emerged during the early modern period. Some of the most evocative images come from the Holy Roman Empire, a hotbed of religious and political strife, and home to about half of all witchcraft-related executions. Albrecht Dürer’s engraving The Witch (1500) comes to mind. Throughout Britain, circulated pamphlets and books helped to promote the image of the witch as an elderly woman who flies on a broom and cavorts with Satan. The above engraving is one such example.
The Age of Enlightenment was the final vanquisher of witch trials in Europe (though they remain an issue around the world to this day), and from that point onward, depictions of witches in art diversified. As I noted earlier in this essay, Macbeth rebounded in popularity, and many of the artists who adapted Shakespeare’s witches onto the canvas adhered to the play’s hag imagery. Nevertheless, cultural changes surrounding witchcraft (namely, that witches were the stuff of fairytales) allowed for tongue-in-cheek renditions like Daniel Gardner’s painting.
But as any folklorist will tell you, interest in the occult never truly disappears. Magic lies fallow beneath the earth and awaits its chance to spring to the forefront of the cultural psyche. Later this month, we will explore Spiritualism: the 19th-century transatlantic movement that put belief in psychic abilities and mediumship at its center. With renewed fascination in occult traditions and a desire to view the jarring modern world as “enspirited” once again, some artists followed suit.
Many of our most evocative images of witches come from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: an artistic community in Britain that rebelled against the Royal Academy’s promotion of Raphael and Mannerism.9 As the name suggest, the Pre-Raphaelites looked to the Italian Renaissance painters who proceeded Raphael; artists like Sandro Botticelli offered ample inspiration. The Pre-Raphaelites had a vision of art that was bold in color, movement, and detail—often incorporating scenes from literature and mythology.
Pre-Raphaelite witches were beautiful femmes-fatales. Favorite characters included Medea and Circe of Greek mythology, as well as Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend. Their mystical abilities made them alluring and powerful, though in a culture that had long ago abandoned witch-hunting, one might argue that these witches had lost their frightening aura.
The first explicitly “good” witch in English literature (and here I refer to the English language and not the country) is Glinda from Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. However, these dreamy Pre-Raphaelite witches might be the ultimate predecessor to contemporary witches in English-language media. When I look at Morgan le Fay with her books and potion materials, I see the Owens women in their house on Magnolia Street, or Dr. Diana Bishop in the library at Oxford.
Witches took a back seat in fine art during the 20th century, despite their dominance in film and television. I, for one, would be interested to see how visual artists could breathe new life into this enduring cultural icon, and what her resurgence might say about our present moment.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth in The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 4.1.4-11.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.3.39.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.3.40-48.
Not to be confused with the Whig Party in the United States (a political party that emerged in the 1830s and stood in opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s policies).
Karen Louise Jolly, “Magic” in Medieval Folklore: A Guide to Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow (Oxford University Press, 2002), 250-252.
Francis Young, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 151.
“Macbeth (Introduction)” in The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 2709.
Young, Magic in Merlin’s Realm, 197.
“The Pre-Raphaelites” in Art: The Definitive Visual History, ed. Andrew Graham Dixon (DK, 2018), 332-333.
Thank you for this article!
"A prevalent misconception about witch trials is that they were common during the Middle Ages. In fact, medieval Europeans held more ambivalent views toward folk magic and 'occult sciences' than one may assume"—well said. Magic was certainly recognized as a potentially destructive force in the Middle Ages, but medieval literature and folklore also abounds with magical elements that reflect a fascination with the mysterious, wondrous, symbolic, and supernatural elements of human life.
As you said, the extreme (at times fanatical) negativity toward witchcraft arrived with the early modern period—how contrary to modern stereotypes, that the era of witch-hunts is associated more with the Renaissance than the Middle Ages! The historian Michael Bailey sums it up well: "Only in the 15th century, however, did authorities begin to argue that the people who performed such acts had placed themselves entirely in Satan’s service, and that they acted not as malevolent individuals but as members of organized, conspiratorial cults of demon worshippers. The image of witchcraft that crystallized at this time generated the first real witch-hunts."
Really interesting stuff! Enjoyed it a lot