John Varley

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John Varley was an English landscape painter in watercolor, a founding member of the early nineteenth-century watercolor movement, and a lifelong, openly convinced astrologer who cast horoscopes with the same matter-of-factness he brought to teaching perspective. Born in Hackney on 17 August 1778 and dead in London on 17 November 1842, he is remembered in two separate histories that rarely meet: the history of British painting, where he was an influential teacher and a prolific exhibitor, and the history of English popular astrology, where he was one of the few respectable practitioners of an art the educated age had largely abandoned. The two were not, to Varley, two things. The same intelligence that read a Welsh valley for its weight of cloud read a face for the planet that had stood over its birth and a morning’s chart for the hour at which the day would turn dangerous.

Portrait of John Varley by his pupil John Linnell (Yale Center for British Art) — John Linnell, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The watercolor man

Varley belonged to the generation that lifted English watercolor from a tinted drawing-master’s craft into an exhibiting art with ambitions of its own. His father, a teacher, had placed him with a silversmith; the boy escaped that trade after the father’s death in 1791 left the family poor, and attached himself in his middle teens to the evening drawing-school of Joseph Charles Barrow at Furnival’s Inn Court in Holborn, first as pupil, then as assistant. The decisive schooling came at the open house of Dr Thomas Monro, the physician-collector whose rooms in the Adelphi were a nursery for the young watercolorists of the 1790s — the same circle that formed Thomas Girtin and the young Turner. Varley’s art carried Girtin’s broad, structural manner forward into the new century: spacious, gravely composed landscapes, many of them gathered on sketching tours through Wales, built on a firm architecture of foreground, middle distance, and receding hill.

Ludlow, Shropshire, a watercolor landscape by John Varley (Yale Center for British Art), showing his structural composition of foreground, middle distance, and receding hill — John Varley, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1804 he became a foundation member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, the body later known as the Old Water-Colour Society, which made the medium a public exhibiting art with its own annual show. He was among its most productive contributors, sending some forty works to the first exhibition and hundreds across the decades that followed. As a teacher he was more consequential still: through his studio passed a roll of the painters who would define English watercolor for the next forty years — David Cox, Copley Fielding, William Henry Hunt, William Turner of Oxford, and, among others, the young John Linnell, whose friendship would later draw Varley into the orbit of William Blake. His sister Elizabeth married the painter William Mulready; his brother Cornelius, an inventor as much as an artist, devised the graphic telescope. Varley issued practical manuals — a treatise on the principles of landscape design, another on the art of drawing in perspective — and pressed on his pupils a single governing maxim, that they should go to nature for everything.

Yet for all the earnings of a sought-after master, he lived in chronic disorder. Improvident, generous, enormous in girth and unfailingly good-humoured, he was arrested repeatedly for debt, leaned hard on Linnell for loans from 1818, and was declared bankrupt and gaoled around 1820. The improvidence and the astrology were of a piece in the eyes of his contemporaries: here was a man who took the heavens more seriously than the rent.

The astrologer

The astrology was not a private eccentricity, nor a parlor amusement attached to a respectable career. Varley believed his calculations worked, and ordered his days by them. He cast his own horoscope each morning and read the figure for what the hours would bring, treating the planetary positions of the moment as a reliable account of the moment’s tendency. This was a deeply unfashionable conviction. By the early nineteenth century judicial astrology had been expelled from the universities and the learned societies for more than a hundred years, surviving in the almanac trade and in the cheap revival worked by Robert Cross Smith (“Raphael”) and Richard James Morrison (“Zadkiel”). To hold it in earnest, as a cultivated professional man moving among Royal Academy circles, was to keep faith with a discarded science — the old doctrine, running back through William Lilly and the Renaissance synthesis of Marsilio Ficino and Robert Fludd to its Hellenistic foundations, that the configuration of the heavens at a person’s birth is legible and that the relation of above to below can be read like a text.

Contemporaries reported that he behaved accordingly. The story most often retold, set down by his own grandson in an account published in the Occult Review in July 1916 and present already in the Victorian biographical record, runs that Varley one morning consulted his chart and found evil aspects coming into operation a few minutes before noon — so threatening that he weighed staying indoors against the danger of a street accident. In the most familiar form of the tale the danger arrives as fire: a blaze breaks out in his house at the appointed hour, and Varley, far from dismayed, watches it with a kind of satisfaction at the chart’s accuracy, more interested in the vindication of his method than distressed at the loss. He is said to have set the destruction beside what he counted a genuine discovery — the manner in which the recently found planet Uranus made itself felt in a nativity — and judged the discovery the larger matter. To his circle other hits were credited: a fatal accident foreseen for a member of the Mulready family, the death of the painter William Collins coming, it was said, on the very day the stars had named, the injury by fire of a tradesman’s daughter. These are the tradition’s own memory of him, reported here as such; the calculations were his, and the conviction that they answered was total.

A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy

In 1828 Varley published the first part of A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy. Its thesis joined the two halves of his life — the eye trained to read form and the mind trained to read the heavens — into a single proposition: that the planets governing a person’s nativity leave their mark on the face and the body, so that character and even physical appearance can be read against the zodiac. Each sign, on this view, stamps a recognizable cast of feature on those born under its dominant influence; the practiced reader, knowing the chart, could expect the face, and, seeing the face, could infer the chart. It was astrology turned outward onto the visible person — the natal figure made flesh — and it proposed to do for the human countenance what the older horary and natal traditions had done for events. Varley intended the work in several parts and planned to extend the doctrine across the signs; only the first part ever appeared.

The Treatise was a collaborative object as much as a doctrinal one. Varley developed it in the company of his two closest friends, Linnell and Blake, and its plates were engraved by Linnell. Among them stood a design by Blake — the study known as The Ghost of a Flea — making the book the only instance of Blake collaborating with another man on the production of a volume. The Treatise thus survives as the printed meeting-point of three figures: the astrologer who believed the heavens marked the body, the engraver-patron who gave the project its hands, and the visionary who supplied the strangest of its images.

The Ghost of a Flea by William Blake (c. 1819–20, tempera and gold on mahogany, Tate), the design that appeared in Varley’s Treatise — William Blake, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Blake and the Visionary Heads

His place in esoteric history rests above all on his friendship with Blake. The introduction came through Linnell, who had been Varley’s pupil and was Blake’s younger friend and patron; in September 1818 he brought the two men together, and they found themselves near neighbours in the streets north of Oxford Street. What followed, from about October 1819 and on through the early 1820s, were the late-night sittings — sessions some contemporaries called séances — held mostly at Varley’s house, that produced the drawings known as the Visionary Heads.

The procedure, as Varley described it, was simple and extraordinary. He would name a historical or legendary person; Blake would wait, then announce that the figure had appeared and stood before him, and draw it from the life as a portrait sitter is drawn. Out of these nights came more than thirty heads — William Wallace and Edward the First, Richard Coeur de Lion, the British chieftain Caractacus, Solomon, Helen of Troy, Job, an architect Blake called the Man Who Built the Pyramids — figures summoned by Varley’s prompting and rendered with Blake’s particular conviction that he drew not from fancy but from sight. The most famous of the sittings produced The Ghost of a Flea, a small panel in tempera mixed with gold on mahogany. The thing Blake said he saw was a monstrous upright creature, and, as Varley recorded the account, it carried with it a doctrine: fleas are inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men, penned into so small a body precisely because, were they the size of a horse, they would drain the country of its people.

Visionary Heads of William Wallace and Edward I by William Blake (c. 1819), drawn during the late-night sittings prompted by Varley — William Blake, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What makes Varley indispensable to the episode is not that he drew anything but that he believed everything. He prompted, he questioned, he wrote down what Blake told him, and he accepted the visions as real seeings rather than as the moods of a powerful imagination. Where Blake’s biographers have long divided over how literally the visionary meant such claims — whether the figures who “stood before him” were perceptions, conventions of speech, or the disciplined products of a mind that saw what it made — Varley appears to have had no doubt at all. His astrological cast of mind, already committed to a cosmos in which unseen powers write themselves on visible things, made him an unusually willing witness, and his readiness to take the heads as evidence is part of why the record of the sittings exists. Several of the drawings survive in sketchbooks he owned: the Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook came to light in 1967, with pages now in the Tate, and a larger companion was rediscovered in 1989, restoring to scholarship the working ground on which the visions were set down.

The record and its reading

What survives of Varley is therefore double, and the doubleness is the point. The landscapes, the teaching, the foundation membership of the watercolor society, the manuals on perspective and design — these belong to the documented record of British art, where his name is secure. The astrology and the Blake sittings belong to a quieter current in which an early-Victorian professional took the older correspondences between heaven and human life entirely seriously, cast his chart before breakfast, watched a fire confirm a prediction, and recorded the moment when a friend claimed to see what no one else could.

The scholarship has worked to keep the two together rather than let the painter eclipse the astrologer or the astrologer reduce the painter to an anecdote. The nineteenth-century biographical record, including the Dictionary of National Biography, fixed the outline of the life; Arthur Symons preserved the crucial extract from the Zodiacal Physiognomy, in which Varley sets down the flea in his own words; G. E. Bentley’s Stranger from Paradise and Blake Records established the documentary frame of the Blake friendship; Martin Butlin reconstructed the genesis of the Treatise from the three-way collaboration of Blake, Linnell, and Varley; and Robert Essick reported the recovery of the larger sketchbook. Across that literature Varley emerges neither as a charlatan grafting star-lore onto a respectable trade nor as a credulous eccentric, but as a man for whom the legibility of the heavens was simply true, held with the steadiness of someone who has checked his figures.

Whether the heavens write themselves on a face, or whether Blake’s heads were drawn from life, Varley left as questions he plainly thought already answered. The pictures remain; the certainty is harder to recover.

Scholarship and sources

The primary biographical outline rests on the nineteenth-century record, gathered in the Dictionary of National Biography article on Varley, which preserves the improvident life, the foundation of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, the line of pupils, and the astrological anecdotes in their canonical form (Wikisource). Varley’s own account of the Ghost of a Flea, taken from A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, was reproduced and discussed in Arthur Symons’s William Blake (Constable, 1907), now in the public domain (Project Gutenberg edition); Symons also carried over Allan Cunningham’s early account of the sittings from the Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters (1830). The fullest modern reconstruction of the Treatise as a collaboration is Martin Butlin’s essay “Blake, Linnell and Varley and A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy,” in Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman, ed. Diana Dethloff, Tessa Murdoch, and Kim Sloan (UCL Press, 2015), pp. 126–135, available open-access (UCL Discovery). For the documentary frame of the Blake friendship and the Visionary Heads the standard references are G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale University Press, 2001) and Blake Records (2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2004), with Robert N. Essick’s report on the rediscovered Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 24.1 (1990). On the broader tradition in which Varley stood — the documented textual history of Western astrology from its Hellenistic foundations through Lilly and the early-Victorian revival — see Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology (Continuum, 2008–09), and Patrick Curry, A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology (Collins & Brown, 1992).

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