An episode in Macbeth by William Shakespeare: the three witches. Mezzotint by J.R. Smith, 1785, after H. Fuseli, 1783.

  • Fuseli, Henry, 1741-1825.
Date:
10 March 1785
Reference:
576077i
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view An episode in Macbeth by William Shakespeare: the three witches. Mezzotint by J.R. Smith, 1785, after H. Fuseli, 1783.

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Credit

An episode in Macbeth by William Shakespeare: the three witches. Mezzotint by J.R. Smith, 1785, after H. Fuseli, 1783. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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Description

When William Shakespeare wrote his play Macbeth, around 1605, there were frequent outbreaks of fear in Europe about the dangers arising from witchcraft. The three witches who open the play seemed to many perfectly credible beings, greatly to be feared and, if possible, to be destroyed. The mixture that Shakespeare's witches claim to make up in the play, from a toad, a Jew's liver, the finger of a child strangled at birth, etc. raises up evil spirits of the kind that were believed to work in cahoots with the devil and to cause illness and death, wasting of crops, shipwrecks and stillbirths. Even after a literal belief in witches became confined to the least educated and least powerful, the witch remained a potent figure in the culture of the elite. The ghastly witches are accompanied on the left by a deathshead moth, a moth with markings resembling a skull on its back

Publication/Creation

London (83 Oxford Street) : J.R. Smith, 10 March 1785.

Physical description

1 print : mezzotint ; image 43.9 x 53.5 cm

Lettering

The weird sisters ; painted by H. Fuseli ; engraved by J.R. Smith

References note

Martin Myrone, Gothic nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the romantic imagination, London: Tate, 2006, p. 130, no. 80 (the painting and reference to this print)

Reference

Wellcome Collection 576077i

Creator/production credits

This portrayal of Shakespeare's witches was produced in 1783 by the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. Fuseli painted horrific and macabre scenes, taking his inspiration from gothic and late mediaeval tales. His paintings were published through mezzotints such as this one, published in 1785: mezzotint is a printmaking technique that is ideal for gloomy and mysterious subjects, especially night-scenes

Reproduction note

After: painting by Henry Fuseli, 1783, in the same direction, of which there are several versions (Myrone, loc. cit.)

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