William Thomas Horton

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William Thomas Horton (27 June 1864 – 19 February 1919) was a Belgian-born English artist, writer, and occultist linked to the symbolist and aestheticist movements. Most of his drawings were not published while he lived. Critics say his work could feel meaningful by instinct, approaching the Symbolist ideal, even though his technique was often limited.

Born in Brussels to English parents from Kent, Horton studied architecture in Brighton and at the Royal Academy in London before abandoning architecture in the early 1890s. In Redhill he started a small magazine, Whispers: A Magazine for Surrey Folk, publishing four issues. He turned to visual art, inspired by Aubrey Beardsley, and his drawings appeared in The Savoy in 1896. He collaborated with W. B. Yeats on A Book of Images, with an introduction by Yeats, published in 1898. Other works include an illustrated edition of Poe’s The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum (1899), The Grig Book (1900), and The Way of a Soul (1905), which he both wrote and illustrated. His friends included Yeats, H. Rider Haggard, Lady Gregory, and Roger Ingpen, who later published a posthumous collection of Horton’s drawings. Horton is invoked as a ghost in Yeats’s All Souls Night, a poem written in 1920 and published in The Tower (1928).