Painter in 1432: Van Eyck completes the Ghent Altarpiece

It is also one of the least regulated. No country licenses painters; there is no exam, no residency, no board. What controls entry instead is a chain of human judgments — art-school portfolio reviews, jury selections, a gallerist's decision to take half of every sale in exchange for walls and collectors. The result is a profession that is trivially easy to enter and famously hard to live from, where a handful of names absorb most of the market's money and attention.

This page follows the trade from cave walls, Fayum mummy portraits and Song-dynasty court examinations through the guilds of Saint Luke, the academies, the paint tube that made Impressionism portable, and photography's great rupture. It covers how people actually train today, what a studio day looks like, the craft rules painters pass down, eight figures who defined the profession across three continents, and how much of the work image-generating AI can realistically absorb.

Do you need to go to art school to become a painter? No — painting has no license anywhere, and history is full of successful painters who trained outside schools: Vincent van Gogh was largely self-taught, and China's Qi Baishi learned by copying a borrowed painting manual by lamplight. But most gallery-represented painters today hold a BFA or MFA, and university teaching posts — the trade's steadiest salary — effectively require an MFA.