David Roberts

Water takes four of his ten planets, earth three, air two and a single one fire, with five of the ten fixed and only one cardinal. The Sun, Mercury and Neptune fill eleven degrees of Scorpio, the sign that commits totally to whatever it has chosen. The record says Roberts made lithographs of Egypt and the Holy Land that shaped how Europe pictured them.

A grand trine closes between the Sun, Saturn and Pluto, which is a self contained figure that asks nothing of the rest of the chart, and Saturn sits in easy contact with Pluto at under four fifths of a degree inside it: durable strength, rebuilding after loss, and authority that was earned rather than handed over. A painter whose plates became the standard image of two regions for a century had exactly that kind of quiet authority, and the figure describes the self sufficiency rather than the travel.

Mercury sits in hard contact with Saturn at under a fifth of a degree, the closest contact here, which is thought meeting doubt: self criticism, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. In a draughtsman that is the useful version. The Moon sits in quiet contact with Venus at twelve hundredths and its sign is certain at sixteen degrees of Leo. Venus sits in hard contact with Mars at just over a degree and the Sun in mild friction with that Venus at the same orb. The Sun itself sits on the second degree of Scorpio with Mercury at thirteen, and Mars on the last half degree of Capricorn, so two planets here sit on a threshold. Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. For a painter whose plates were copied and recopied across a century, a mind that checks itself twice is the reading the lithographs argue for.

He died in London on 25 November 1864, at sixty eight. Mars stood square his natal Uranus at a tenth of a degree that day and the transiting Sun square his natal Jupiter at a third. The Moon was balsamic and fourteen per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.