The Witches of San Millán

The Witches of San Millán, painted in 1907 and held at the San Telmo Museoa in San Sebastián, is one of Zuloaga's most overtly symbolic and dramatic works, drawing on the deep Spanish tradition of witchcraft imagery that runs from Goya's Witches' Sabbath through the rural folk beliefs of Castile and the Basque Country. San Millán de la Cogolla is a village in La Rioja associated with the earliest surviving texts in Castilian Spanish, but it was also a region with strong popular traditions of folk magic. Zuloaga depicts women — bent, dark-clothed, windswept — against a dramatic nocturnal or twilight landscape that channels the atmosphere of Goya's black paintings. The San Telmo Museoa, the Basque museum in San Sebastián, is an appropriate repository for this work, which speaks to both Spanish and Basque folk traditions. The 1907 date places it in Zuloaga's most ambitious period of large-scale symbolic paintings.

The nocturnal or dramatic twilight palette departs from Zuloaga's typical daylit earth tones, using deep blues, acid yellows, and lurid greens in the sky to create supernatural atmosphere. The figures are bent and darkly silhouetted, their forms merging with the landscape in a manner that recalls Goya's witchcraft series. Wind-driven movement is suggested through posture and loosened clothing.