La Ronde du Sabbat, Louis Candide Boulanger (c.1861)

La Ronde du Sabbat, Louis Candide Boulanger (1861)

Louis Candide Boulanger’s La Ronde du Sabbat is a fever dream of Romanticism’s darker edge—a vision where the supernatural collides with theatrical spectacle. Painted in 1861, the work depicts a frenzied witches’ sabbath, bodies whirling in wild abandon beneath a night sky charged with menace. Figures twist in contorted poses, illuminated by an eerie, unnatural light that seems to pulse from within the composition.

Boulanger, a close friend of Victor Hugo and a key figure in the French Romantic movement, was known for his fascination with drama, history, and the fantastic. His art often embraced the sensational, translating literature, legend, and myth into visual form. In La Ronde du Sabbat, he draws on European witchcraft lore to explore the boundaries between fear, desire, and imagination—reflecting 19th-century France’s cultural obsession with the occult. This is Romanticism at its most operatic: a dance of shadow and flame, where the grotesque becomes strangely beautiful.

Cotton and polyester canvas on Radiata pine wood frame sourced from renewable forests. Includes back mounting.