Painter in 100: The Fayum mummy portraits — Section 678: The Fayum mummy portraits

The oldest image-making trade on record — from 45,000-year-old cave walls to the contemporary studio, still practiced one brushstroke at a time. Painting is older than writing, older than agriculture, older than the wheel. A warty pig painted on a cave wall in Sulawesi, Indonesia has been dated to at least 45,500 years ago, and a 100,000-year-old paint-making workshop — ochre, grindstones and abalone-shell mixing pots — was excavated at Blombos Cave in South Africa. Every society that left a record left painted images, which makes this arguably the oldest continuously practiced skilled trade on earth.

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.