John Varley

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John Varley was an English landscape painter in watercolour, a founding member of the early nineteenth-century watercolour movement, and a lifelong, openly convinced astrologer who cast horoscopes with the same matter-of-factness he brought to teaching perspective. Born in 1778 and dead in 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 astrology was not a private eccentricity. Varley believed his calculations worked, and contemporaries reported that he behaved accordingly — most famously in the story, often retold, that he had predicted a day of danger for himself and, when a fire broke out in his house at the appointed hour, watched it with a kind of satisfaction at the chart’s accuracy. In 1828 he published the first part of A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, which argued that the planets governing a person’s birth left their mark on the face and form, so that character and even appearance could be read against the heavens. He intended further parts; only the first appeared.

His place in esoteric history rests above all on his friendship with William Blake. In the early 1820s the two men sat together late into the night for the sessions that produced the so-called Visionary Heads: drawings Blake made of figures he said stood before him — historical persons, biblical kings, and the strange tempera study known as The Ghost of a Flea. Varley, by his own account, prompted and questioned Blake during these sittings and accepted the visions as real seeings rather than fancy. Where Blake’s biographers have long debated how literally the painter meant such claims, Varley appears to have had no doubt at all, and his astrological cast of mind made him an unusually willing witness. Some of the Visionary Heads survive in a sketchbook he owned.

What survives of him is therefore double. The landscapes and the teaching belong to the documented record of art; 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, and recorded the moment when a friend claimed to see what no one else could. 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.

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