Image source: artvee.com
Introduction
Alphonse Mucha’s “Witches” (1897) is a page of quicksilver energy. Drawn in graphite with the confidence of a virtuoso, the sheet conjures a coven in full flight above a scatter of rooftops, their bodies looping through the air like calligraphic strokes. One witch crouches mid-leap, another leans forward on a broom, hair and drapery streaming behind them, while smaller figures—familiars, imps, or comic sidekicks—cling and caper along their path. Below, pitched roofs and chimneys form a jagged cityscape, a geometry of bricks and angles over which the curved lines of sorcery arc and spiral. The drawing is at once study and performance: a rehearsal of poses, a testing ground for rhythm, and a narrative snapped at the exact instant when motion becomes flight.
1897 and the Expansion of Mucha’s Vocabulary
By 1897 Mucha had become a sensation in Paris for the sinuous posters that transformed the city’s walls into theaters of line. This drawing arrives from the very heart of that success, but its subject is strikingly different from the serene allegorical women of his decorative panels. “Witches” embraces mischief, folklore, and nocturnal drama. It shows the artist extending his vocabulary beyond sanctified beauty into the lively territory of fable. The whiplash curves that framed actresses and seasons now propel supernatural bodies through the sky. Rather than halo his figures with static ornament, he uses the very language of Art Nouveau—those elastic, musical lines—to visualize wind, speed, and the irresistible pull of gravity reversed.
Folklore Reimagined for a Modern Eye
The witch is as old as European storytelling, yet Mucha gives her a fin-de-siècle freshness. These women are powerful, agile, and unmistakably alive. No morbid caricature, no grotesque hook-nosed hag appears here. The leading witch crouches like a sprinter in air, one hand shielding her face from the onrush, the other gripping her broom; the second leans forward with purposeful grace. Their hair becomes weather, their skirts turn to streamers of force, and the broom bristles flare like a pair of improvised wings. Mucha fuses the medieval symbol with modern gesture, so that the witches read both as figures from legend and as athletes of the ether.
Composition and the Aerial Stage
The drawing’s stage is the sky itself, an oblique slice of nocturnal space above a patchwork of roofs. Across the lower third, steep gables and chimney pots are sketched in with shorthand precision, enough to establish a city but not enough to anchor the witches to a specific address. The largest chimney sits like a pedestal, receiving a tail of streaming drapery that seems to pour into it as smoke might. This visual loop ties earth to air and turns the city into an instrument that the witches play. Their trajectory traces a long diagonal from left to right, countered by the up-thrust of chimneys and the small figures that bounce along behind them. The page behaves like a musical staff on which the melody of flight rides above a bass line of rooftops.
Velocity in Line
Mucha stages speed without blur. He does not smudge graphite into fog; he writes velocity in the grammar of line. Hair is a ribbon that unfurls; drapery is a comet tail; broom bristles fan backward in evenly spaced filaments that telegraph acceleration. The leading witch’s posture—knees tucked, torso pitched, head bowed slightly against the wind—compresses the body into a compact engine. The second witch, drawn in lighter outline, is offset like a ghost image a fraction of a second earlier, a compositional double exposure that multiplies motion. Everywhere, contours thicken at turns and thin at straights, a pressure code that lets the eye feel momentum.
Draftsmanship in the Open
“Witches” is gloriously unpolished. Pentimenti show where Mucha moved an arm, tested a profile, or angled a leg more decisively into the airflow. The rooftop line is assembled from quick, confident strokes that refuse fussy correction. This openness is not indecision; it is a record of thinking at speed. The theatrical clarity of his posters rests on such rehearsal. Here, we watch the choreography being set: how far the lean must be to read as flight, how tight the knees must tuck to keep the figure aerodynamic, how much length the hair needs to articulate wind.
The Lead Witch: Anatomy of a Leap
The primary figure is a study in compressed dynamism. Her spine curves like a bow, shoulders rounded, and the small of her back pulls tight above a belt of knotted fabric. One foot curls under, the other extends like a fin. The hand lifted to her face works as both shield and expressive accent, creating a wedge shape that faces the oncoming air. The head tilts downward just enough to keep her features readable—cheekbone, brow, the mischievous lift at the corner of the mouth—without breaking the forward thrust. The result is a figure who is not simply moving through space but punching a channel into it.
The Companion and the Echo
To the left, a second witch, lighter and more linear, crouches low over her broom. She is less finished, more atmospheric—a necessary echo that clarifies direction and deepens the illusion of a coven. The decision to draw her as a spectral twin rather than a fully modeled partner prevents visual traffic jams. She reads as both companion and time exposure, the same gesture a beat behind. This doubling enriches the narrative without crowding the page.
Familiars, Imps, and Comic Relief
Beneath the witches flicker small presences: a dangling figure clutching the underside of the flight path, a little goblin balancing a bucket, perhaps even a catlike shape sprinting across tiles. Mucha keeps these tiny actors elastic and playful. Their scale injects humor and opens a middle ground between the monumental witches and the hard geometry of roofs. They also help the eye pace the space, acting like stepping stones that set the beat of movement from chimney to chimney.
The City Below: Angular Counterpoint
The rooftops serve as counterpoint. Their lines are angular, their forms brick-solid, their logic architectural. They supply the world against which the witches measure themselves. The diagonals of eaves and ridges break into sharp V’s; chimney pots are cylinders capped with lips; a large rectangular stack sits nearly front and center like an altar. By resisting detail, Mucha keeps the city anonymous—a theater set rather than a portrait of a district. This choice allows the narrative to float free of geography and function as a universal night ride.
Smoke, Broom, and the Metaphor of Transformation
A key pleasure of the drawing is the way it reassigns functions. Drapery thickens into a trail that behaves like smoke; smoke behaves like trajectory; the broom is both vehicle and wing. At the composition’s base, the streaming tail of cloth seems to pour into a chimney as if the witches themselves were fuel for a furnace of magic. The entire image becomes an allegory of transformation: solid to vapor, earthbound to airborne, domestic hearth to nocturnal ceremony. It is as though the energies pent inside the city’s chimneys have escaped as living forms, looping back to remind the houses of the night’s older, wilder economy.
Humor Balanced with Menace
The mood is exuberant rather than sinister, but a sliver of danger remains. The lead witch’s grin is impish; the creatures skittering behind flirt with the grotesque; the diagonal sweep threatens to tumble the viewer forward. Mucha’s wit controls the tone. He knows that too much menace would collapse the drawing into melodrama, and too much sweetness would turn it to pastiche. He lands in the pocket where mischief gleams and the ancient thrill of transgression is felt without moralizing.
The Whiplash Line as Narrative Device
Art Nouveau is often defined by the whiplash curve, a line that accelerates, snaps, and flows with serpentine grace. In “Witches” that line is not merely decoration around a figure; it is the figure’s very mode of existence. Hair, broom, and body all obey the same sinuous logic. The drawing becomes a proof that Mucha’s ornamental language can tell stories of action, not only halo statuesque muses. It is a rare sheet where the decorative principle and the narrative subject are so perfectly fused that to describe one is to describe the other.
Female Agency in a Nocturnal Key
Mucha’s women typically project serene sovereignty; here, sovereignty is kinetic. These witches own the night sky not by symbolic attributes but by physical mastery. Their agency is expressed as control over balance, trajectory, and speed. In a culture that often caricatured witches as figures of fear or ridicule, Mucha reframes them as protagonists of energy. The broom, historically a domestic tool, becomes a staff of freedom; the rooftop, locus of hearth smoke and family heat, becomes a launching pad. Without didacticism, the drawing flips the codes of the everyday.
The Page as Working Surface
Technically, the sheet reveals an artist who composes expansively. The witches cluster in the upper half, leaving a generous margin of sky that breathes. Lines of construction ghost faintly where the artist blocked in proportions. The graphite is not overworked; it glows in places with the metallic sheen that develops when a pencil is pushed just firmly enough. Occasional stains and smudges are less blemishes than patina, evidence that the drawing lived in a studio full of hands and ideas. The signature, tucked low and right, does not announce completion so much as acknowledgment: the author recognizes the vitality of this rehearsal.
Spatial Logic Without Perspectival Fuss
Though perspective is lightly indicated in the roofs, the drawing’s space is defined more by overlap and rhythm than by vanishing points. The witches overlap the city; their tails overlap the chimney; the small figures overlap one another in tumbling sequence. The result feels convincingly deep without pedantic construction. This is performance space, not surveyor’s space. It is measured in beats and arcs, not meters and angles.
Relationship to Mucha’s Decorative Panels
Comparing “Witches” with Mucha’s contemporaneous panels reveals a strategic shift. In the panels, figures stand or float within ornate frames, their gestures contained by cartouches, floral wreaths, or halos. In “Witches,” the frame is implied by rooftops, and the halo is replaced by wind. Yet the family resemblance is strong. The faces hold the same poised inwardness; the hair still composes arabesques; the body’s long curves remain the skeleton of the design. The drawing shows how the decorative can be released into action without losing its identity.
Narrative Timing and the Slice of Night
Mucha chooses a precise temporal slice: the instant of leap and glide, before the witches settle into a steady trajectory. In cinematic terms, it is a frame in which the figures are all impulse and extension, every muscle pointed toward the next second. He resists the temptation to illustrate the full story—no assembly of cauldrons, no gathering of a coven around a hilltop fire. The economy of this choice heightens the charge. We arrive when the spell has already worked and the air is the only stage that matters.
The Expressive Economy of Faces
Even at small scale, the faces carry character. The lead witch’s profile is sharp, the mouth curled into a smile that mixes delight with a hint of insolence. The companion’s features are sparer, drawn with a few assertive lines that keep her from competing for attention. Mucha does not weight the drawing with elaborate expression; he allows posture and line to carry most of the emotion. The faces, like cymbal taps in an orchestration of strings, punctuate the sweep without overloading it.
Why the Drawing Feels So Modern
The sheet feels contemporary because it solves problems that still preoccupy illustrators and animators: how to convey speed with static means, how to design a page whose blank areas participate in storytelling, how to make a body read instantly and memorably. Mucha’s answers are crisp. He trades shading for contour rhythm; he uses echoes and after-images to suggest the past position of a form; he treats accessories as motion amplifiers rather than mere props. The result anticipates visual devices that would become standard in twentieth-century graphics.
The Enduring Spell
“Witches” endures because it captures the joy of drawing and the thrill of transgression in a single breath. We feel the graphite move, we feel the bodies cut the air, we feel the roofs slide beneath like a scored accompaniment. It is a page that invites seeing and re-seeing: first the big sweep, then the tucked foot, then the imp with a bucket, then the delicious curve where a tail of cloth pours into a chimney. The drawing is complete enough to satisfy and open enough to keep summoning the viewer back for another ride across the night.