Young sorceress

The Young Sorceress from 1857 belongs to Wiertz's engagement with the supernatural and the occult that runs parallel to his horror subjects throughout his career. A young sorceress implies transgression — female power operating outside sanctioned religious or social structures — and Wiertz approaches the subject with the combination of fascination and moralising energy that characterises much of his work on transgressive themes. The witch or sorceress figure in mid-nineteenth-century painting carried multiple associations: Romantic fascination with the medieval, anxiety about female agency, the Symbolist preoccupation with the femme fatale that would crystallise in the following decades. Wiertz anticipates the Symbolist femme fatale in several of his female subjects, making the Young Sorceress an interesting transitional figure between Romantic demonology and the darker imagery of the fin de siècle. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium hold the painting alongside Wiertz's other supernatural subjects, where it forms part of a coherent set of explorations into the boundaries of acceptable power and transgressive knowledge.

The sorceress subject allows Wiertz to employ the dramatic lighting effects he favoured for supernatural subjects — candle or fire light from below, casting upward shadows that distort and intensify. The figure would be rendered with careful attention to youthful beauty contrasted with the signs of occult knowledge — objects, gestures, or the quality of the gaze. Wiertz's handling in this type of subject tends toward high contrast and detailed rendering of the figure against a darkened atmospheric background.