Witches Going to the Sabbath by Falero: The Painting No Museum Owns (1878)
Naked witches spiral through moonlit air. A goat, a bat, a bird’s skeleton, a salamander slithering at the edge: Luis Ricardo Falero’s Witches Going to Their Sabbath (1878) is less a single scene than a hypnotic circuit. Your eye never parks. Victorian Britain stared anyway. Today the picture is one of the most widely reproduced images of witchcraft in art, although it hangs in no public museum. The picture below is our vintage poster version of the painting; the original is shown further down.
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Artist: Luis Ricardo Falero (1851–1896)
Date: 1878 (signed and dated lower left)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: private collection
Notable fact: Granada-born painter of nudes, astronomy and occult fantasy who worked mainly in London, where he died at 45
A spiral, not a stage
Falero builds a triangle of foreground figures that loosens into a circle and then a spiral, looping you back to the start. At the bottom, a young redhead clings to her broomstick; above her, a woman rides a black goat; higher still, dozens of smaller figures swirl into the clouds. The Sabbath becomes motion: a flight towards the ritual rather than a static portrait of a coven. The night is full of moonlight, so the bodies stay luminous while the sky keeps turning.
An occult catalogue
Around the flying women gather the props of popular witchcraft. A bat spreads its wings at the top left. An old, hook-nosed witch crouches beside the goat, the animal traditionally associated with the Devil at the Sabbath. On the right, a skeletal figure with a bird’s skull leers out of the dark, and at the bottom right a black salamander, the creature that alchemists believed could live in fire, slips out of the frame. Falero’s private fascinations, magic, stars and mysticism, spill into a picture that moral England could condemn and still crowd to see.
The subject has deep roots. The Witches’ Sabbath, a nocturnal gathering where witches were said to meet the Devil, had been described by demonologists since the late Middle Ages, and the nineteenth century rediscovered it through literature, above all through the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe’s Faust. Falero returned to Faust several times, and his witches belong to that Romantic imagination of the night.
Who was Luis Ricardo Falero?
Falero was born in Granada on 23 May 1851. He studied in Paris, not only art but also chemistry and mechanical engineering, and trained as a painter with the academic artist Gabriel Ferrier. He later settled in London, where he made his career with sensual images of women drawn from mythology, the Orient and fantasy, such as The Enchantress (1878), Faust’s Dream (1880) and The Planet Venus (1882). He was also a passionate amateur astronomer and illustrated books by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion; stars and planets often appear in his paintings.
In England he called himself the “Duke of Labranzano”, a title of his own invention. He died at University College Hospital in London on 7 December 1896, aged only forty-five. For more of his work, see our essay on his Reclining Nude.
The painter museums forgot
Successful in Britain, France and the United States, Falero remains little known in Spain, and most of his paintings are in private collections; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds a watercolour, Twin Stars. Witches Going to Their Sabbath is famous in reproduction and absent from museum walls, which suits an artist who sold fantasy rather than civic monuments. Absence from a permanent gallery does not mean absence from desire.
Why the flight still hooks
The picture flatters the act of looking itself: sensual, endless, slightly guilty. It is occult theatre for a century that preached restraint. Compare it with a very different vision of witches painted eighty years earlier, Goya’s dark and satirical Witches’ Flight, or with Waterhouse’s solitary sorceress in The Magic Circle. Follow Falero’s spiral once for the witches. Follow it again for the Victorian appetite that needed them.
Hang Luis Ricardo Falero’s Witches Going to Their Sabbath as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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See Falero’s Witches Going to Their Sabbath framed on your wall: a museum-quality print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Where can you see it?
Witches Going to Their Sabbath is in a private collection and is not on public display. For more nineteenth-century nudes and mythologies you can see in museums, read about Cabanel’s Birth of Venus in Paris, or browse by theme in Explore Art.
Watch the video essay (in Spanish) on @SapiensVerbum on YouTube.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Luis Ricardo Falero”; Wikimedia Commons, “Witches going to their Sabbath by Luis Ricardo Falero”.
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