Magician and Dragon
Carl Spitzweg, 1875
Magician and Dragon is a small oil on panel by Carl Spitzweg showing a sorcerer at the centre of the scene, surrounded by skulls arranged in a circle, while a dragon with black wings rises before him from a crack in the rock. A reddish glow rises from below the ground, and a dense grey smoke fills the sky above. Behind the smoke, a sunlit fairy-tale castle appears, resembling Neuschwanstein, whose construction had begun in 1869. Spitzweg, a German painter known for ironic narrative scenes, mixes the fantastic with gentle humour rather than drama. Two nearly identical versions exist, differing in size and colour. Critics have read the dragon as Fafnir from Norse myth, and the painting as a wry jab at the Wagnerian enthusiasm of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Its recent history also matters: it was sold in 1937 by a Jewish collector persecuted by the Nazis, and in 2019 it was returned to his heirs.
- Painter
- Carl Spitzweg
- Date
- 1875
- Medium
- oil paint, panel
- Dimensions
- 30 × 22 cm
- Museum
- Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt
- Genre
- mythological painting
- Depicts
- ruins, smoke, magician, forest, city, sky, brook, dragon
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