Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh painted for only about ten years. In that time he produced more than 2,000 artworks, including roughly 860 oil paintings, and wrote hundreds of letters to his younger brother, Theo, who supported him financially for most of his adult life. He sold very little during his lifetime. Within a few decades of his death he was among the most famous painters who ever lived.

He was born at 11:00 a.m. on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, in the Netherlands, a time from his birth record. Four planets fall in the tenth house of vocation and legacy: the Sun and Mercury in Aries, and Venus and Mars in Pisces. Aries is fiery, urgent and pioneering, and Pisces is visionary, emotional and porous. With so much of both in the tenth, astrologers would expect a calling pursued with total intensity and a public legacy far larger than the life itself, and the legacy is exactly what came, almost all of it after he died.

Aries describes the urgency of his work. He painted at a feverish pace, sometimes finishing a canvas in a day, with thick, fast strokes of pure color. Pisces describes the vision: the swirling skies, the glowing night cafés and the sense of a world charged with feeling.

He came to art late. He worked for an art dealer, then as a teacher and lay preacher among coal miners in Belgium, before deciding at 27 to become an artist. He taught himself largely by drawing, moved to Paris, where Theo worked, and discovered Impressionism and color. In 1888 he moved to Arles in the south of France, hoping to found an artists' colony, and painted his sunflowers, his bedroom and the Yellow House. A visit from Paul Gauguin ended in crisis, when van Gogh cut off part of his own ear.

His Moon is in Sagittarius in the sixth house, with Jupiter in Sagittarius there too. The sixth house is about health, daily work and routine. A Sagittarius Moon longs for meaning and freedom, and in the sixth it ties emotional life to the daily labor of work. Van Gogh suffered from serious mental illness, and he spent a year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he painted The Starry Night in 1889, looking out from his window. Work, he wrote to Theo, was the thing that kept him going.

Cancer is on his Ascendant, a sign of deep sensitivity and attachment to family. His bond with Theo was the central relationship of his life, and their letters remain one of the great records of an artist's inner life.

In July 1890, at 37, he died from a gunshot wound in Auvers-sur-Oise, generally believed to have been self-inflicted. Theo died six months later. The four planets in the house of legacy have had the final say: the work he could barely sell now hangs in the world's great museums.

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