What Makes a Family of Artists

The New Yorker:

The debate over the nature of creativity is an old one: Is creative talent, be it novelistic, musical, or artistic, something that you’re born with, or is it something that anyone, with practice and dedication, can acquire? Anecdotally, the first option presents a strong case. The Waugh family produced three generations of novelists: Arthur, then Alec and Evelyn, then Auberon (Evelyn’s son). From the affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West came the novelist Anthony West. There are the Dumases (Alexandre, père and fils), the Rosettis (Gabriele and children Christina and Dante Gabriel), the Brontës (Emily, Charlotte, and Anne), the Jameses (Henry and William), the Amises (Kingsley and Martin), the Millers (Arthur and Rebecca)—the list continues to the present. The amount of artistic talent that often spans generations has caused many researchers to wonder if there isn’t something heritable about creativity.

To Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century polymath and psychologist, the frequency with which talent passed through families was more than mere a coincidence. When Galton was in his forties, he began to reflect on his life—King Edward’s School, Cambridge, stints at the Royal Geographic Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Not only had he associated with many talented, intelligent people, he realized, but those individuals were often related to others who shared their propensities and skills. “Thinking over the dispositions and achievements of my contemporaries at school, at college, and in after life, [I] was surprised to find how frequently ability seemed to go by descent,” Galton wrote, in the introduction to the 1869 volume “Hereditary Genius.” (Galton himself was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin.) The title of his work heralded his main conclusion: that some individuals had “an ability that was exceptionally high, and at the same time inborn,” and that it was this hereditary genius, rather than a combination of traits or factors, that led to true creative achievement. “It follows that the men who achieve eminence, and those who are naturally capable, are, to a large extent, identical,” Galton wrote.

Read the whole story: The New Yorker