The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle is an oil painting on canvas by John William Waterhouse, dated 1886, in the collection of Tate, London, which acquired it through the Chantrey Bequest in the year it was painted.

Waterhouse showed the picture at the Royal Academy in 1886, the year after he was elected an Associate. Following Consulting the Oracle and Saint Eulalia, it was his third exhibit with a supernatural theme in as many years. It was well received by critics and public alike; the Magazine of Art wrote that Waterhouse was still at his best, original in conception and pictorial in his results. The Chantrey trustees bought it for £650, and it entered the national collection under accession number N01572.

A barefoot woman, part witch and part priestess, uses a long wand to trace a glowing circle on the ground around herself and a steaming cauldron, while a crescent-shaped sickle in her other hand links her with the moon and the goddess Hecate. A live snake coils around her neck and the smoke rises in a straight column, as if under her command. Outside the circle the land is barren and ravens and a frog, creatures associated with witchcraft, are shut out; inside lie flowers. Her appearance mixes sources, from a Middle Eastern complexion to an early Anglo-Saxon hairstyle, and the figures on her dress have been read both as warriors and, by Guy Tal, as a Medusa copied from an Archaic Greek vase in the British Museum.

The canvas measures 182.9 by 127 cm. Waterhouse had sketched the composition in sepia pen and ink in 1880 to 1881, and also painted a study and a smaller replica, 88 by 60 cm, both privately owned. Harry Furniss parodied the picture in Punch, and it was lent to the British Library exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic in 2017.