The Man Who Painted Spirits
a William Blake and John Varley ghost story about the art of seeing beyond the Veil…
In the early nineteenth-century, three accomplished British artists worked together to sketch and document an array of spirits. Some of those summoned were the imagined spiritual forms of historical personages while others were the personifications of cosmic concepts. Maybe a few were ghosts?
John Varley was a well respected Georgian-era painter and astrologer. He began his training as a silversmith but, while still a teenager, indulged his passion for painting by joining the regular evening classes of Joseph Charles Barrow who spotted Varley’s latent talent and took him on an intensive painting excursion to Peterborough. On their return, a drawing Varley had done of the Cathedral there was accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1798. From then on, he was considered a professional painter, exhibiting regularly and receiving commissions.
The following year, he visited North Wales. He felt such a spiritual affinity for the rugged mountains and lakes of Eryri (Snowdonia) that he would return several times over the following years in search of ‘the sublime’. His landscapes, mainly painted in watercolour, are noted for celebrating the majesty of such wild places that had previously been thought of as…
