The Mandrake: A Charm

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Artist: Henry Fuseli (Swiss, 1741–1825)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 25 × 29 1/2 inches (63.5 × 74.9 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

The Swiss-born Henry Fuseli settled permanently in Britain in 1779. He was known for extravagant historical paintings and took great pride in his nickname: “Painter in Ordinary to the Devil.” A master of the macabre, he based many of his works on dark and sensual subjects taken from literature. This painting depicts a scene from Ben Jonson’s play The Masque of Queens (1609) in which witches collect ingredients for potions. One of the witches declares, “O’ the ground, to heare the Mandrake grone; And pluck’d him up, though he grew full low, And as I had done, the cock did crow.”

As the witch plucks the mandrake, a plant traditionally associated with fertility due to its human-like roots, a sorcerer riding a cockerel warns her about the imminent arrival of dawn. The addition of a fashionable eighteenth-century woman looking on in horror echoes contemporary responses to the painting. Upon viewing it for the first time, Horace Walpole declared Fuseli to be “shockingly mad, madder than ever, quite mad.”

Text: Yale Center for British Art.