Henri Matisse

Earth takes five of his ten planets, fire three, and a single one apiece in air and water, with five of the ten cardinal. The Sun, Mercury and Mars fill sixteen degrees of Capricorn, built on competence and on having actually done the thing. The record says Matisse led the Fauves and spent sixty years on colour, and that after surgery confined him to a bed and a chair he invented the cut-outs, which many people think are the best thing he did.

Mercury sits directly opposite Uranus at nine hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact. The reading is thought jumping the rails: nervous tension, changing position abruptly, and being right in a way nobody else has the context to follow. A painter who answered a failing body by inventing a new medium is that contact with a biography attached, and a T-square closes on the same Mercury and Uranus with Neptune, so the figure has no outlet and keeps arriving back at the same point.

Venus sits in quiet contact with Mars at a tenth of a degree, which is desire that moves easily: warmth, creative energy and an uncomplicated relationship with wanting things. In sixty years spent on colour, that is the contact that accounts for the appetite rather than for the invention. The Moon answers from Sagittarius at twenty one, needing room, and both lights are certain. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets.

He died at Nice on 3 November 1954, at eighty four. Neptune stood in easy contact with his natal Venus at four tenths of a degree and square his natal Mars at half, working both ends of that quiet pair, while Pluto sat directly opposite the same natal Venus at seven tenths. The transiting Sun sat sixty degrees from its own natal place at under three fifths. The Moon was a crescent at forty six per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.