Frida Kahlo was born with the Sun in Cancer, the Moon in the very last degree of Taurus and Leo rising: a chart about home, the body and the self as an image, which is close to a summary of her paintings.

She was born at 8:30 in the morning on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán, in the house her family painted blue, the Casa Azul, where she also died in 1954. Her birth certificate is the source for that time, which is why the chart carries Astro-Databank's highest rating, AA. Kahlo herself liked to give 1910 as her birth year, the year the Mexican Revolution began; the chart below uses the date on the record.

Leo rising: the self-portrait as a way of life

The Rising sign describes how a person meets the world and how the world first sees them. With Leo rising at 23°, Kahlo met it as a presence: the joined brows she refused to pluck, the Tehuana dresses, the flowers and ribbons braided into her hair. Leo is the sign of the face held up to be seen, and around a third of the paintings she left are self-portraits. She painted herself, she said, because she was so often alone and because she was the subject she knew best. A Leo Ascendant will recognise both halves of that.

Her Mercury, the planet of thought and words, is also in Leo but sits in the 12th house, the most private part of the chart. In her last decade she kept an illustrated diary, full of colour, sketches and letters to Diego Rivera that were never meant for an audience. It is a very 12th-house Mercury: the brilliant inner monologue kept just out of sight.

Sun in Cancer, joined to Neptune

Cancer is the sign of home, family, ancestry and protection, and Kahlo's work keeps returning to exactly that: her parents and grandparents painted as a family tree, her Mexican heritage worn and painted with pride, the house in Coyoacán at the centre of her life. Her Sun sits within a degree of Neptune, the planet of imagination, dreams and images. Sun–Neptune people tend to live with one foot in the symbolic. Kahlo's paintings are full of roots, ribbons, hearts and doubles, yet she rejected the label of surrealist and insisted she painted her own reality rather than dreams. With Neptune on the Sun, the two are not as different as they sound.

The opposition: Mars and Uranus across from the Sun

The strongest pattern in the chart is an exact opposition. Across from her Cancer Sun sit Mars and Uranus together in Capricorn, both retrograde, in the 5th house of creativity and romance. Uranus is the planet of sudden change and the break with the expected; Mars is force and drive. Astrologers often read a Sun–Uranus opposition as a life rearranged by events that arrive without warning.

In Kahlo's case the history is well documented: polio at six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, and in 1925, at eighteen, a bus crash that broke her spine and pelvis and left her in pain for the rest of her life. It was while she was confined to bed, with a mirror fixed above her and an easel her mother had made for her, that she began to paint seriously. The 5th house is where a chart keeps its art. Hers had Mars and Uranus in it: a creative life that started as a radical response to a sudden blow.

Venus with Pluto at the top of the chart

Venus, the planet of love and of taste, sits within a degree of Pluto in Gemini in the 10th house, the most public point of the chart. Venus–Pluto is the signature of love as an all-or-nothing force, and in the 10th it plays out in public. Her marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, twenty years older, was famous in its own time: married in 1929, divorced in 1939, married again in 1940, with affairs on both sides. The 10th house is also career and reputation, and with Venus there her art became her name, slowly at first and then completely. Her painting The Frame was bought by the Louvre in 1939, the first work by a twentieth-century Mexican artist to enter its collection.

A Taurus Moon at its last degree

The Moon describes what someone needs to feel safe. Taurus asks for the senses: colour, texture, food, flowers, the garden. Kahlo's Moon is at 29° Taurus, the final degree before the sign changes, and also sits in the 10th house, so her private emotional life and her public image are hard to pull apart. That is the paradox of her work in one placement: intensely personal paintings that became some of the most recognisable images of the century.

Saturn in Pisces in the 8th house

Saturn is endurance, and in the 8th house it deals with crisis, other people's resources and transformation. In Pisces it suffers quietly and persists. Kahlo had more than thirty operations in her lifetime. When her first solo exhibition in Mexico opened in 1953, a year before her death, her doctors had told her to stay in bed, so she arrived by ambulance and received her guests from a four-poster bed carried into the gallery. That is Saturn in Pisces in the 8th, with a Leo Ascendant making sure everyone saw it.

What her chart says about yours

If you share her Cancer Sun, you will know the pull towards home and family, and the need to make something of your own story. If you have Leo rising, you have probably been told you have "presence" more than once. Compare your chart with hers below to see where your planets meet.