Eugène Delacroix

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Earth takes five, water four and a single one air, with five of the ten fixed and only one cardinal. The Sun, Mercury and Jupiter spread across twenty two degrees of Taurus. The record calls Delacroix the leading French Romantic painter, whose Liberty Leading the People became the image of revolution itself, and says he kept a journal that is one of the best accounts of how a painter thinks.

No fire at all, in the leading Romantic painter of his country, whose best known picture became the image of revolution, is the flattest inverse this project has printed. Fire in a chart is a temperament, quick and self-starting and easily bored, and a reader holding that record would put six planets in it. There are none. The chart is weighted into earth and water instead, which are the elements of what gets made and what gets felt, and a painting is both of those before it is a slogan.

The Moon sits conjunct Uranus at half a degree, the tightest contact here, and the reading is unpredictable feeling: emotional independence, needing far more freedom than most, and moods that change without warning or apparent cause. The record's second fact is a journal that is one of the best accounts of how a painter thinks, and a journal is exactly where somebody with moods that change for no apparent reason would be in a position to notice it happening. That is a resonance between a reading and a habit rather than between a reading and an event.

Mars sits square Jupiter at the same half degree, action outrunning sense: overreaching, and taking a risk because it is available rather than because it is wise. Mercury sits sixty degrees from Venus at three fifths, charm in communication, and the Sun sixty degrees from Saturn at a degree, structure supporting the self. The Moon's sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Virgo, which settles a feeling by finding a task. Uranus and Neptune were the two retrograde planets. He died at Paris on 13 August 1863, at sixty five. Mars stood in easy contact with his natal Sun at under a third of a degree that day. The Moon was balsamic and one per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.