The Warlock (Spitzweg)

Description

In the lower half of the painting, a warlock stands in a dark rocky landscape, with six or seven skulls arranged in a circle around him. He holds his staff high in a pose resembling a schoolmaster or tamer. Before him, a small dragon rises with open mouth, clinging to a boulder with its front paws, its snake-like tail wrapped around the rock. The dragon's black wings stand out against a red glow from underground, likely from a crevice. Thick lead-gray smoke curls above, behind which a sunlit fairytale castle, reminiscent of Neuschwanstein Castle, appears next to a towering column. The artist's monogram signature, a stylized S, is at the bottom left.

Provenance

The smaller painting, catalog number 1394, was handed over to the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt and has been on display there since 2000. The larger painting, catalog number 1395, was in the art collection of Jewish industrialist Leo Bendel in the early 1930s. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bendel and his wife Else were forced to sell furniture and artworks below value to fund emigration. Bendel sold The Warlock on June 15, 1937, for 18,000 Reichsmarks to the Heinemann Gallery in Munich, a transaction legally viewed as a loss of property due to persecution, making the painting Nazi looted art.

On August 12, 1937, Lina Oetker, wife of baking powder manufacturer August Oetker, purchased it for 28,000 Reichsmarks. In 1968 it passed to Rudolf-August Oetker through inheritance and became part of the Rudolf August Oetker GmbH art collection. In June 2006, the Bendel heirs contacted Kunstsammlung GmbH to negotiate a fair solution under the Washington Declaration, but the company refused. In October 2016, the Oetker Group announced it would examine the collection for stolen art and likely return the painting.

In November 2019, the Rudolf-August Oetker GmbH art collection returned the painting to the heirs of Leo Bendel, who had been murdered by the Nazis.