Paul Gauguin

Water takes four of his ten planets, fire three, air two and a single one earth, with five of the ten mutable and only one fixed. Neptune was the only retrograde planet. The record says Gauguin left a career as a stockbroker and a family to paint, spent his last decade in Tahiti and the Marquesas, and that the work and the life are difficult to separate and both are argued about.

Jupiter sits square Uranus at under half a degree, the tightest usable contact here, and the reading is growth arriving disruptively: opportunity that costs stability, and restlessness that discards something workable for something merely new. The record's first sentence is a career and a family left behind. Discarding something workable is that sentence in the vocabulary's own words, and the cost in the phrase opportunity that costs stability was paid by people the record mentions only as a family.

The record's last sentence does something unusual: it flags its own argument. The work and the life are difficult to separate and both are argued about, which is a record declining to settle a question it knows is there. This entry declines it too, and for a plainer reason: a chart has no standing on it at all. A reading about restlessness is not a judgement about what he did in the Pacific, and anybody who wants the chart to supply one is asking it for permission.

His Moon sits on the third degree of Virgo at noon with Leo still possible, so it is left out, and the chart's only closed figure, a T-square using that Moon with Venus and Neptune, goes with it. What remains is loose, because nothing else comes inside a degree and a half. Venus sits square Neptune at a degree and three quarters, love and illusion, and in mild friction with Uranus at nearly two degrees, closeness and freedom colliding, both at orbs too wide to lean on. A single planet in earth, in a painter, is the count worth one clause. He died at Atuona on 8 May 1903, at fifty four. Jupiter stood square his natal Sun at under a fifth of a degree that day and Venus square his natal Saturn at a fifth. The Moon was gibbous and ninety two per cent lit.