Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) whose full-length portrait appears in the same series. As with the other "Black Paintings", Goya began with a black background which he painted over with lighter pigments, then with broad, heavy brushstrokes of grey, blue and brown. The darker areas were achieved by leaving the black under-paint exposed; this is most obvious in the figure of the Devil. Like the other works in the series, "Witches' Sabbath" is worked up through heavy, slashing brushstrokes. The plaster was underlaid with thick carbon black before the paint was applied in hues of white lead, Prussian blue, vermilion of mercury, and crystals of
Witches' Sabbath Witches' Sabbath The Witches' Sabbath is a term applied to a gathering of those considered to practice witchcraft and other rites. Prior to the late 19th century, it is difficult to locate any English use of the term 'sabbath' to denote a gathering of witches. The phrase is used by Henry Charles Lea's in his History of the Inquisition (1888). Writing in 1900, German historian Joseph Hansen who was a correspondent and a German translator of Lea's work, frequently uses the shorthand phrase "hexensabbat" to interpret medieval trial records, though any consistently recurring term is noticeably rare in the copious