Neptune in Taurus

A painting of light on water can still stop you in a gallery, and that pause is exactly what their world was learning to make.

Painting the light

In April 1874 a group of painters who had been refused by the official salon hung their own exhibition in Paris. A critic mocked one canvas, a harbour at sunrise by Claude Monet called Impression, and the name stuck. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions, the last in 1886, and all of them fell within the years Neptune spent in Taurus. Neptune stands for longing and for what blurs; Taurus, which Venus rules, is the body, the garden, the loaf, the field in afternoon light. For a generation, the dream was to see ordinary things as beautiful.

Your great-grandparents’ world

The people born under this Neptune are the grandparents of today’s grandparents. They grew up with gas lamps, horse-drawn carts, the first telephones and the first bicycles. Their ideals were homely and physical: a good garden, a well-made chair, a Sunday walk in clean clothes, bread that tasted of something, a piece of land to call one’s own. They planted trees they knew they would never sit under, and some of those trees still stand.

If a photograph of one of them hangs in your family, look at what they chose to hold in it: a tool, a book, a child, a bunch of flowers from their own ground.

Leaving the land

Neptune dissolves as well as dreams. For this generation the dream of the land was also the heartbreak of it, as millions left farms for cities and oceans for new countries, carrying seeds in their pockets to plant somewhere else.

Returning

In 2038 Neptune returns to Taurus, and a new cohort carries the same longing into a world with very different ground under it. What they idealise is anyone’s guess: clean water, real food, the texture of a thing made by hand, in an age of screens.

Somewhere in your house there is probably an object that one of these ancestors made or chose, still in use, still more beautiful than it needs to be.