Ranson, Paul - Witches Around the Fire (1891)

The Ritual at the Temple

Paul Ranson didn't just paint a picture of witches. He invited them into his studio. It was 1891 and the Nabis were tired of the world looking exactly like the world. They wanted something deeper. They wanted the spirit. Ranson turned his workspace into a place called The Temple. He wasn't playing pretend. He filled the air with incense and talk of the occult and the strange. This was a time when the medieval past and modern anxiety met over a bubbling cauldron.

The painting is a flat landscape of shadows. Ranson took the lessons of Gauguin and the sharp lines of Japanese prints and mashed them together. He looked at stained glass and saw how the heavy lead lines held the light in place. He did the same here. The colors are blocks of mood. They don't try to be real. They try to be felt. It is a sabbat pulled from old folklore and dropped into the middle of a Parisian art scene that was hungry for magic.

The fire isn't there to keep anyone warm. It is the center of a ritual. These figures are not portraits. They are shapes carved out of the dark. Ranson died in 1909 but he left behind this window into a world where the decorative was a weapon against the boring. He proved that you don't need depth to show the bottom of the soul. You just need a bold outline and a little bit of fire.

References

Ranson, Paul. Witches Around the Fire. 1891. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Boyer, Patricia Eckert. The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde. New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Clement, Russell T. Les Nabis A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Greenwood Press, 1996.

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