Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer stands among the very greatest of the Dutch Golden Age, the painter of Delft who could hold an entire inner world in a single shaft of light falling across a quiet room. Baptised on 31 October 1632, the son of a weaver and innkeeper, he grew up surrounded by textiles and pigments and turned that intimacy into masterpieces such as Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid and The Art of Painting. His Sun in Scorpio explains the hush and the depth: Scorpio shines through what is hidden, the eagle who reads the unspoken, and Vermeer's genius was exactly that, catching the subtlest, most private moment and making it eternal. That Sun sits in the eighth house, the Scorpionic house of secrets and the buried, the very place a soul illuminates the unseen.

His Moon in Gemini gave him a mental, observant, ever-curious emotional nature, quick to notice detail, and it falls in the fourth house at the base of the chart, rooting his life in home: he married Catharina Bolnes, fathered a large family under constant financial strain, and worked slowly, meticulously, close to hearth and household. An Aquarius Ascendant marked him the quiet black sheep, unrecognised in his own time. Only the nineteenth century saw what he truly was.