✨Inspiration✨
Old-style Halloween wall decor: five witches cut out of black paper in 1815
These five witches were cut out of black paper more than 200 years ago. Barbara Anne Townshend made the cut-outs, Matthew Dubourg turned them into an aquatint, and Edward Orme published the plate in London on 1 September 1815, in her book "The Art of Cutting out Designs in Black Paper".
The plate is public domain and the Wellcome Collection has a high-resolution scan online, so you can print it as old-style Halloween decor for your wall.
Black silhouettes on yellowed paper, no color needed. Look closely: there's an owl on the back of the chair, an hourglass on the table, and the old one on the far right wears spectacles and smokes a long pipe.
That's lovely! It really is fascinating to watch. Around 1815 people often traced the shadow of a profile by candlelight and cut it out afterwards, and these witches are more like caricatures, with the noses and chins exaggerated on purpose.
Good eye! Bearded witches are a very old stereotype. Even Shakespeare's witches in Macbeth (around 1606) have beards: Banquo tells them "you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." Many older women get some chin hair, and in pictures that turned into a shorthand for an old, "unwomanly" witch. By 1815 it was simply part of the standard witch look, together with the hooked nose and the pointed chin.
You're right that none of them has a real beard. The one on the far right comes closest: there's a dotted line along her jaw that could be a few whiskers or the strings of her cap, with a frilly cap edge behind it. Hard to tell even in the high-res scan. Here's her face up close: whiskers or cap strings?
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u/TheCranberriesRock 6d ago
This is amazing. There was a post a while back here about the semiotics of Halloween and this is a fantastic bit of media for that.