Learning to paint: A family affair

Instead, the man he grew up to be cast his eye on nature, following her lead "in search of every mountain peak amazing enough to be put into my sketchbook", to quote Zhu himself. Thanks to that approach, Zhu created some of the most breathtaking pieces known to the Chinese art history, with an intuitive, almost willful style that never failed to respond to either nature's changing moods or his own temperaments. The result is transcendental rather than simply representational.

However, his idiosyncratic approach didn't mean that he was not conscious of what had been done by those who came before him. Although he was never quite able to find ease with the art-world establishment of his time, he did share their view that history offered lessons and that anyone in search of the true spirit of Chinese painting should look beyond the recent past into the more distant one.

"Paintings done during the beginning and the middle part of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) are infused with a powerful magnificence," he said, before going on to lament on its loss in the following centuries.