Paul Cézanne

His ten planets divide three in earth, three in air, two in fire and two in water, with four cardinal and four mutable, and nothing in this chart was retrograde at his birth. There are no closed figures in it either. The record says Cezanne painted the same mountain over sixty times, breaking form into planes in a way that led directly to cubism, and that Matisse and Picasso both called him the father of us all.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Mars at just over half a degree, which is effort coming easily and in one's own interest: physical confidence, and somebody who does not need to be talked into starting. An artist who began the same painting more than sixty times had to be able to start without being talked into it, and of the three usable contacts in this chart that is the one the record argues for.

It is a loose chart otherwise. The tightest thing in it is Uranus in quiet contact with Neptune at four tenths of a degree, which moves slowly enough to belong to a whole generation and is worth nothing for him in particular. After the Sun and Mars, nothing sits inside a degree: Mercury in quiet contact with Venus at just over one, Venus sixty degrees from Saturn at a tenth past it. The Sun sits at twenty nine degrees of Capricorn with Mercury on the sixth, and the Moon answers from Pisces at twenty, absorbing whatever is in the room. Both lights are certain.

He died at Aix on 22 October 1906, at sixty seven, in the town he was born in. Uranus stood conjunct his natal Mercury at just over a quarter of a degree that day, Venus sixty degrees from his natal Neptune at three fifths, and the transiting Sun square its own natal place at the same orb. The Moon was a crescent at twenty seven per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.