Waterhouse's Magic Circle and the Enchantresses of Victorian Painting
The 1886 painting at Tate Britain, the protective circle of the magical tradition and Waterhouse's enchantresses, from Circe to the crystal ball.
In 1886 John William Waterhouse exhibited at the Royal Academy a painting that was immediately bought for the national collection through the Chantrey Bequest: The Magic Circle, now at Tate Britain. A woman with long dark hair, in a desolate landscape, draws a circle on the ground around herself with a wand, while thin smoke rises from a cauldron set over a fire. It is one of the most famous images of the sorceress in Victorian painting.
The circle, the ravens and the cauldron
Every detail helps to separate two worlds. Inside the circle, freshly scored in the earth, are the woman, the fire and the cauldron; at the edges appear some black ravens, a frog and a skull. The smoke rises vertically and seems to form an invisible wall. In the background an arid landscape with ruins can be glimpsed, placing the scene in an undefined antiquity, and the sorceress's dress is decorated with archaic-looking figures.
In the learned magical tradition the circle was the protected space from which the practitioner could address invisible powers without being overwhelmed by them: medieval and Renaissance grimoires describe it, and theatrical scenes of necromancy recall it, such as the one in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in which the protagonist summons Mephistopheles.
Waterhouse and his enchantresses
Born in Rome in 1849 to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse trained at the Royal Academy and at first painted scenes of ancient life in the style of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. With The Magic Circle he began a long series of female figures endowed with mysterious powers, drawn from myth, Arthurian literature and Romantic poetry. For this reason he is often regarded as the late heir of Pre-Raphaelite painting.
There followed, among others, The Lady of Shalott of 1888, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses of 1891 and Circe Invidiosa of 1892, in which the sorceress poisons the water where her rival Scylla will bathe, following the account in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1902 he painted The Crystal Ball, with a young woman in Renaissance dress gazing into a transparent sphere beside an open book.
A literary magic
Waterhouse's enchantresses do not reproduce real practices and do not refer to any precise doctrine. They derive from classical texts, from Homer to Ovid, and from a Victorian imagination that saw the woman with occult powers as a figure both fascinating and disturbing. The Magic Circle does not show a ritual but the suspended moment in which the boundary between the ordinary world and the invisible one is drawn.
The painting was born in the years when occult societies were flourishing in England: the Theosophical Society had been founded in New York in 1875, and in 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would be founded in London. There is no evidence that Waterhouse belonged to either, but the public that admired his enchantresses breathed the same climate of curiosity about the occult and ancient religions.
The Magic Circle remains a perfect image of the nineteenth-century fascination with ancient magic, filtered through literature and academic painting. Its immediate acquisition for a public collection shows that this fascination was not marginal but shared by artistic institutions. It is still among the best-known images of Victorian painting and a constant reference for anyone studying the figure of the sorceress in art.