The Magic Circle, 1886 John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of John William Waterhouse also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Magic Circle is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Barefoot on dun-coloured earth, a lone enchantress stands poised at the edge of her freshly scribed circle. Dressed in a turquoise robe cinched with a russet sash, she leans forward, her wand still touching the sand while a crescent-shaped sickle glints in her other hand. Before her, a bronze cauldron blazes on an improvised tripod, its fierce embers mirrored by scattered petals of pale blossom lying safely within the protective ring. Smoke twists upward in a taut, almost architectural column that cleaves the canvas, while outside the chalk arc a knot of rooks and a solitary toad wait, barred from the ritual space. Beyond, ochre cliffs and the suggestion of desert ruins evoke a land both specific and imagined.

Waterhouse modulates his palette with deliberate restraint. Dusty umbers and siennas dominate the barren ground and distant masonry, allowing the cool clarity of the robe and the sudden vermilion of the fire to command the gaze. The concentrated turquoise not only isolates the figure but also imbues her with an other-worldly authority; the eye registers the dress first, then climbs the luminous column of vapour to the silent, moonlit sky. The chromatic contrast works less as spectacle than as quiet insistence, persuading the viewer to accept the uncanny as natural.

Close inspection reveals a disciplined, economical facture. The artist lays thin, translucent glazes across the background, creating atmospheric depth without superfluous detail, while reserving denser, more tactile strokes for the foreground fire and folds of cloth. The smoke, feathered with fine, wet-into-wet touches, merges painterly bravura with narrative necessity. Compositionally, the vertical plume anchors the scene, counterbalanced by the sweeping diagonal of the wand and the faint, shimmering circumference of the magic circle—an elegant geometry that guides the eye in a measured circuit from ground to sky and back again.

Painted in 1886, the work discloses the period’s preoccupation with arcane knowledge and the femme fatale. Waterhouse, steeped in Pre-Raphaelite legacies yet alert to contemporary Orientalist fantasies, assembles an eclectic syntax of costume and symbol—the Saxon curls, the Persian embroidery, the Hecatean sickle. His witch is neither wholly malign nor purely decorative; she is the agent of a mysterious, self-contained rite whose meaning the painter refuses to resolve. That deliberate ambiguity, couched in fastidious craft, gives the picture its enduring, unsettling allure.