J. M. W. Turner

Earth takes five of his ten planets, air three, fire two and not one of them water. The element that would register a thing before deciding about it is missing from the chart entirely, which in the record of a painter whose whole subject the record gives as light and weather is a coincidence worth naming and leaving unexplained. Turner painted, and the record says he pushed light and weather almost to abstraction fifty years before anybody else tried.

The Sun sits on the fourth degree of Taurus with Jupiter at twenty three and Venus at twenty nine, three planets spread right across the sign that builds on what it has accumulated rather than on what it announces. The Moon answers from Aquarius at twelve, which handles a feeling by stepping back and examining it. Mercury sits on the sixth degree of Aries. For a painter working half a century ahead of the argument, a Taurus Sun with an Aquarius Moon is the pairing to keep: the patience belongs to one and the detachment to the other.

Mars lies at an awkward angle to Pluto at just over two tenths of a degree, force against force, and that is the closest contact in the chart. The Sun stands at the same awkward angle to Saturn at three eighths, identity meeting a rule that will not move. Nothing else here comes inside a degree and a half, so this is a loose birth with two exact frictions in it. Venus sits conjunct Uranus at just under two degrees, taste that is genuinely its own, and square Mars at about the same. Saturn and Neptune both stood retrograde that day. In an artist working fifty years ahead of the argument, two exact frictions inside an otherwise loose chart is the shape worth keeping.

He died at Cheyne Walk on 19 December 1851, at seventy six. Three separate bodies stood on his natal Mars that day: the Sun in easy contact with it at thirteen hundredths of a degree, Saturn the same at two thirds, and Pluto at two degrees, so the one planet his chart had locked in friction was being touched from three directions at once. Saturn also stood square his natal Pluto at seven eighths. The Moon was balsamic and twelve per cent lit, a phase that finishes a thing, lets it go and is already looking past it, which for a painter the record places fifty years ahead of everybody is the better of the two readings.