Edward Caswell: A Unique Artistic Perspective

Edward Colie Caswell is #182 on the Jones 1000.  I could not find much about him except in this article from “The Villager” online.  

“It was an ant with a crumb twice its size in its jaws slowly making its way over the twigs. It occurred to me that if I were that little ant, the shrubbery would look like a great forest, and so with my face close to the ground, I tried to view the scene as my minute energetic acquaintance was observing it. In a moment the twigs became great fallen trunks, the dried spruce shrubs turned to gigantic trees with twisted branches and I was looking into a forest out of the depths of which a band of Nibelungs laden with gold and silver treasure, and even Wotan himself, might have come.”
— Edward C. Caswell, “Artist Draws the Narrowest City Dwelling,” The Villager (1933)

Caswell, while like English artist-illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, also preferred black and white line drawings, was unlike Beardsley in that he worked in a more natural style; Beardsley used the Art Noveau fashion for his drawing.

Marc Edmund Jones has Caswell listed as being born on September 12, 1876 at 9 AM, in New York, New York.  This gives him a 29 Libra 09 rising as shown on the chart above. Thus Caswell’s ascendant has the Hyperion symbol of “a green sky with a water-spout.” McClung writes this suggests a useful knowledge of the flow of events “starts with attention to observation” and slowly builds a connection between what is perceptible and what is unseen.

Noticeable in the chart above is the amount of “quintiles” Caswell has, showing his talent for his field (see Venus, the planet of art, quintile Mercury, the planet for business). The Saturn handle to his bucket formation must have encouraged him to work in black and white highlighting form, while his Mercury in the twelfth house showed he worked for large publications, which is probably the Villager magazine mentioned above. He was perhaps their in-house staff as all references I have found only show that connection.

 This essay was updated on 17 December 2025. It previously had no tags.