These tools are usually ascribed to druids, who allegedly used them to harvest mistletoe. The sorceress holds a golden sickle in her left hand. ‘The Magic Circle’ (1886) by John William Waterhouse
#John william waterhouse the magic circle full
Unfortunately, this has a tendency to reduce people and places to stereotypes, rather than acknowledging them as the full people or places that they are. Frances Fowle does note Waterhouse’s fascination with “the exotic”, which we can see here (2000). Yet Waterhouse has gone for a ‘mix and match’ approach to his set dressing, making it hard to find a place or time for the scene. This painting feels like it should be mythological, due to its setting. This painting depicts a sorceress, drawing a magic circle with her wand, while she brews a concoction in her cauldron. I’d argue we could say the same of ‘The Magic Circle’. Meanwhile, this ondine is neither, making her an otherworldly creature in an otherwise drab human space. This reflects the role of women as either the Angel of the Hearth or the Fallen Woman in wider Victorian art. Women tend to either play dangerous characters or tragic figures in Waterhouse’s work. Waterhouse himself abandoned the somewhat chaste figure of the ondine in favour of the predatory naiads, the water nymphs of Greek myth. Ondines would later be recast as femmes fatale in later Victorian paintings. The undine later influenced ‘The Little Mermaid’ by Hans Christian Andersen (1837). He essentially gives her a soul in exchange for his fidelity. She can only get an immortal soul if she marries a human. The ondine looks like a human, but doesn’t have a soul. Gnomes, sylphs and salamanders represented earth, air, and fire respectively. Paracelsus invented these beings to represent the element of water in the 16th century.
‘Ondine’ (1872) by John William Waterhouse A man stands watching from a doorway behind her. A woman with long blonde hair stands on the side of a fountain in a town square. ‘Ondine’ is an early painting that at first seems to bear little relation to folklore. Let’s see just how that works in the paintings of John William Waterhouse. Yet they’re also used to further various Victorian cultural projects around class, imperialism, gender, and religious belief (Kestner 1991: 565-6). Ironically, we see classical subjects appearing as a rebuttal to the Pre-Raphaelites. You can find mermaids, Circe, naiads, and many other paintings among his work that will be familiar if you’ve read this blog before. Some think the fascination comes from the fact he was born in Rome. Many of them depict Greek and Roman mythology. Indeed, Waterhouse created 118 paintings in total. This is where we see a switch from mythology to folklore, albeit folklore filtered by literature. He started out with classical subjects but replaced these with Romantic poetry and Shakespeare in the late 1880s (Silver 2011: 265). Waterhouse was not strictly a Pre-Raphaelite since he borrowed from their subject matter but not their techniques. ‘Echo and Narcissus’ (1903) by John William Waterhouse
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