Jacques de Gheyn II drew rats, frogs, mice and crabs with the eye of a naturalist. He made meticulous studies of flowers and insects, and his most widely printed work was a military manual, The Exercise of Arms (1607), which showed the soldiers of Maurice of Nassau exactly how to handle a musket and a pike, step by step. Then, in the same years, he produced some of the most bizarre images of witchcraft in European art. The combination is exactly what makes his witches so unsettling.
De Gheyn worked in Haarlem, Leiden and The Hague around 1600, among scholars at the new University of Leiden and the court of the Dutch stadtholders. The Mannerist style of the time loved crowded, strange compositions, and his witch drawings pushed it to its limit.
What sets his images apart is how observed they feel. The toads, rats, lizards and cats that swarm his witch scenes are drawn as carefully as his natural history studies, which gives the fantasy an eerie realism. Some historians read this as a skeptic's joke, pointing out the absurdity of witch beliefs by rendering them with scientific precision. Others see genuine fascination with the idea of hidden forces in nature, a common interest among learned people in an age when natural philosophy, alchemy and magic still overlapped.
Context helps. The Dutch Republic turned away from witch trials remarkably early. The last execution for witchcraft in the northern Netherlands took place around 1600, just as de Gheyn was making these images, while in parts of Germany, Scotland and elsewhere the trials were accelerating. In the town of Oudewater, the "Witches' Weigh House" issued certificates confirming a person's weight, a document meant to prove they weren't light enough to fly on a broomstick. People traveled from abroad to get one.
De Gheyn's designs also reached a wider audience in print. The large engraving Witches Preparing for the Sabbath, made by Andries Stock around 1610 after a design by de Gheyn, turned his private imagination into an image collectors across Europe could buy, and it remains one of the best-known witch prints of the century.
His drawing sits at a turning point. The world that produced it still half believed in night flights and pacts with the devil, but it was also learning to look closely, measure carefully and ask for evidence. De Gheyn did both at once, and you can feel the tension in every line.
Jacques de Gheyn II's Witches' Sabbath and the related Stock engraving appear on our: