Lucian Freud

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Fire and water take four each and air two, with five of the ten fixed. The record says Freud painted flesh with a scrutiny most sitters found difficult, over sittings that ran to hundreds of hours, and that Sigmund Freud was his grandfather.

Venus sits in hard contact with Pluto at four hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is total attraction turned hard: relationships that transform the person, magnetism, and an all or nothing approach that leaves very little room for the ordinary. A painter whose looking was itself the difficulty, over sittings counted in hundreds of hours, has taste welded to concentrated force at four hundredths of a degree, and nothing else in this chart comes near the record so directly.

No earth anywhere, in a painter whose whole subject was a body in a room, is the second thing to say and it is a contrast rather than an explanation: the element that would register the physical has no planet in it. The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Mars at fifteen hundredths, effort coming easily and in one's own interest, and a grand trine closes between Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto, a closed figure that asks nothing of the rest of the chart. His Moon sits on the fifth degree of Leo at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out. Venus, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets.

He died in London on 20 July 2011, at eighty eight. Uranus stood in easy contact with his natal Moon at under a third of a degree that day, which would be the closest thing in that sky if the Moon's sign were settled, and it is not, so it has to be set aside along with the Moon itself. The Moon was disseminating and seventy five per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.