Learning to paint: A family affair

Yet one aspect of this process — and perhaps the least openly-discussed aspect — is that despite all the privileges, few born into a luminous art family grew up to outshine their ancestors. That's because "when one was kept from an early age within the shadow — or aura — of his father and grandfather, who were most likely in control of every aspect of his art education, it would be very hard for the person, humbled and in reverence of the family legacy, to really outgrow that experience to form something uniquely his own," says Wang Yimin. "And to have something of his own was the only way one could possibly carve out a place right beside those he once looked up to."

One man whose life could have followed the storyline of an elite family-trained scholar-artist struggling to find his own voice was Zhu Ruoji (1642-1707), who had the good luck to be born into the royal family of the Ming Empire (1368-1644) and bad one to have this happen two years before its collapse. Finding shelter in a Buddhist temple following the killing of his father when he was mere 2, Zhu, who later adopted the art name Shitao (meaning stone wave), was denied at a young age nearly all access to old-master collections a privileged art education would certainly entail.