Painter History: From Cave Walls to the Paint Tube

For most of its history, painting was not self-expression but service: images made to order for temples, tombs, courts and churches, by craftsmen whose names were rarely recorded. The idea that a painting is primarily the trace of one individual's vision is recent — a Renaissance invention that took four more centuries to fully take hold.

What changed across 45,000 years was less the act — pigment, binder, surface, hand — than three surrounding questions: who was allowed to paint for money, what paintings were for, and who decided what a good one was. Guilds, academies, salons, dealers and now algorithms have each held that last power in turn, and every handover reorganized the profession.

Where it began

c. 45,000 BCESulawesi, Indonesia

The oldest known figurative painting is a warty pig on the wall of Leang Tedongnge cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dated to at least 45,500 years ago by uranium-series analysis published in 2021. The craft's toolkit is older still: at Blombos Cave in South Africa, archaeologists led by Christopher Henshilwood found a 100,000-year-old paint workshop — ground ochre, charcoal, seal bone and abalone-shell mixing containers. Europe's famous caves came later: Chauvet's lions around 36,000 years ago, Lascaux's bulls around 17,000, the latter found in 1940 by four teenagers following a dog down a hole.

Timeline

c. 45,000 BCEThe Sulawesi warty pig

A team led by Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm dates a painted warty pig at Leang Tedongnge cave, Sulawesi, to at least 45,500 years old — the earliest known figurative painting, made with red ochre by an anatomically modern human whose species had reached the island by sea. Publication in 2021 shifted the presumed birthplace of figurative art away from Europe.

c. 100 CEThe Fayum mummy portraits

In Roman Egypt, workshop painters produce startlingly lifelike portraits in encaustic — pigment in hot wax — on wooden panels bound into mummies. About 900 survive, many excavated by Flinders Petrie at Hawara from 1888. They are the largest surviving body of panel painting from the ancient world, and the faces still read as individuals two thousand years later.

1432Van Eyck completes the Ghent Altarpiece

Jan van Eyck finishes the Ghent Altarpiece, begun by his brother Hubert, pushing layered oil glazes to a realism no tempera painter could match. Vasari later credited Jan with inventing oil paint — wrongly, since oil binders were centuries old — but his refinement of the technique set the medium that would dominate European painting for the next five hundred years.

1563Florence founds the first art academy

At Giorgio Vasari's urging, Cosimo I de' Medici charters the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, with the elderly Michelangelo honored as its symbolic head. For the first time painters have an institution that classes them with scholars rather than with the craft guilds — the opening move in a status campaign that would take centuries to win across Europe.

1648Paris builds the academy-salon machine

The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture is founded in Paris, with Charles Le Brun among its leaders, and from 1667 runs the Salon — the state exhibition that decided which painters existed in the public eye. For two centuries the academy's hierarchy of genres, with history painting at the top, defined what ambition in painting meant.

1841Rand patents the paint tube

American portrait painter John Goffe Rand patents the collapsible metal paint tube, replacing pig bladders and glass syringes. Ready paint that traveled made painting outdoors practical, and the Impressionists knew what they owed it: Renoir told his son that without colors in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro — nothing the journalists would call Impressionism.

1874The first Impressionist exhibition

Shut out or fed up with the Salon, thirty artists including Monet, Renoir, Degas and Berthe Morisot mount their own exhibition in the former Paris studio of the photographer Nadar. Critic Louis Leroy mocks Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" in Le Charivari under the title "Exhibition of the Impressionists" — and the insult becomes the name of the movement that broke the academy's monopoly.

1907Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

In his Montmartre studio, the 25-year-old Pablo Picasso paints five fractured figures drawing on Iberian sculpture and African masks. Even his allies are appalled — Matisse and Braque among them — and the canvas stays largely unexhibited until 1916. It becomes the hinge into Cubism and the license for a century in which painting no longer had to describe what eyes see.

1949Life magazine anoints Pollock

Life magazine asks, over photographs of Jackson Pollock dripping industrial paint onto canvas rolled flat on a barn floor, whether he is the greatest living painter in the United States. The article marks the moment the center of ambitious painting is seen to have moved from Paris to New York — and the moment the mass media began making painters famous the way it made film stars.

2018An AI-made portrait sells at Christie's

"Portrait of Edmond de Belamy", generated by the French collective Obvious using a generative adversarial network trained on 15,000 historical portraits, sells at Christie's New York for $432,500 against a $7,000–10,000 estimate. The sale forces the profession's oldest question — what exactly is being paid for in a painting — into its newest form.

The eras

Prehistoric animal paintings in red and black pigment on a cave wall. — Mariano · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

c. 45,000 BCE – 500 CE

Cave walls, tombs and temples

The first painters worked for ritual, not markets: ochre animals deep in Sulawesi and Franco-Cantabrian caves, Egyptian tomb walls painted to strict canon by anonymous workshop teams, Greek panel painters like Apelles — court painter to Alexander the Great — famous enough that Pliny the Elder recorded their rivalries four centuries later, though not one of Apelles' works survives. Rome's Fayum portraits show a mature commercial trade: standard formats, workshop production, clients paying for a likeness to carry into the afterlife.

A historical depiction of Saint Luke painting, patron of the medieval painters' guilds. — Jan de Bray · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

500 – 1400

Icons, scrolls and guild workshops

Medieval painting was organized labor in service of belief. Byzantine icon painters worked inside strict theological rules and stayed almost entirely anonymous; European towns folded painters into guilds of Saint Luke, which set apprenticeship terms, materials standards and who could sell within the city walls. China ran the era's most sophisticated system: Emperor Huizong's early-12th-century painting academy admitted court painters by competitive examination, setting poetic lines as painting subjects — a state art school eight centuries before Europe's.

The opened Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, a landmark of early oil painting. — Jan van Eyck / Presumably Hubert van Eyck · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

1400 – 1839

Oil paint, academies and the old masters

Van Eyck's perfected oil glazes gave Europe a medium of unprecedented depth, and the Renaissance gave painters a new self-image: Titian was ennobled by Emperor Charles V in 1533, and the legend that the emperor stooped to pick up the painter's dropped brush became the trade's favorite status parable. Academies in Florence, Paris and London gradually pried painting out of the guilds, while the Salon system turned exhibition into a career's gate — and left a generation of rejected painters ready to revolt.

Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise, which gave Impressionism its name. — Claude Monet · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

1839 – 1945

Photography and the great rupture

When Daguerre's process was announced in 1839, the painter Paul Delaroche is reported to have declared that from that day painting was dead. What actually died was painting's monopoly on likeness — and the trades built on it, from miniature portraits to topographic views. Freed and cornered at once, painters went where the camera could not: fleeting light with the Impressionists, structure with Cézanne and the Cubists, and by the 1910s pure abstraction, with Hilma af Klint in Sweden painting abstract cycles from 1906, years before Kandinsky's better-publicized claims.

Exhibition pavilions at the Venice Biennale, the oldest recurring international art exhibition. — Naturpuur · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

1945 – present

The global contemporary

After 1945 the market's center moved from Paris to New York, and the profession's training moved into universities: the MFA replaced the academy concours as the credential of ambition. Biennials multiplied — Venice from 1895, São Paulo from 1951, Documenta from 1955 — and the market globalized, with Chinese ink and academy traditions, Latin American and African painting entering rooms that had long priced only the Western canon. Auction records climbed from millions to hundreds of millions, while the median painter's income barely moved at all.

What this job replaced

Neighbouring trades that no longer exist — absorbed, automated or regulated away.

Portrait miniaturist

c. 1520–1860

For three centuries, painters like Nicholas Hilliard at the Tudor court made tiny portraits in watercolor on vellum or ivory — carried in lockets, exchanged in courtships, sent with marriage negotiations. The daguerreotype of 1839 did the same job faster, cheaper and with a machine's authority; within two decades the trade had collapsed, and many miniaturists survived by becoming photographers or hand-tinting other people's photographs.

Guild master of Saint Luke

c. 1300–1795

In most European towns, nobody could legally take painting commissions or sell pictures without membership in the local guild of Saint Luke, which enforced apprenticeships, materials standards and monopoly. Vermeer served twice as headman of Delft's guild. The French Revolution's d'Allarde law abolished guilds in 1791, and Napoleonic rule swept away the Dutch and Flemish guilds soon after — ending five centuries of licensed painting.

Cinema hoarding painter

c. 1920–2000

Through most of the twentieth century, film posters and cinema-front billboards were painted by hand at enormous scale — nowhere more than in India, where Bombay studios employed crews to repaint hoardings weekly, and where a young M. F. Husain, later India's most famous modern painter, started out painting cinema billboards for a few annas per square foot. Digital flex printing killed the trade almost everywhere within a decade of the mid-1990s.

Trades that vanished →

Painting has already survived the loss of its ritual monopoly, its guild licenses, its academy hierarchy and its claim to be the only way to fix an image — the camera took that in 1839 and the profession responded with its most inventive century. Image-generating software is the newest chapter of a very old argument, not the first.

What has not changed since Sulawesi is the transaction at the core: a human being decides an image is worth the labor of making by hand, and other human beings decide that this particular made object, by this particular maker, is worth keeping. Every era has renegotiated who gets to make that judgment; none has automated it.

🖌️Origins & Evolution

Where it began

Timeline