A quiet concentration in the studio at Vanilla House, near Black River

N his 1949 classic, The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s narrator describes how a drawing he’d seen in his childhood inspired him to attempt his own. He “succeeded”, he says, in depicting a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, but when he showed it to grownups, they thought it was a hat.

Thus “disheartened” at the age of six, he “gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter” and chose a much more pragmatic career instead: he became a pilot.

I’m sure my own art career had a similarly disastrous trajectory. Indeed, the world is full of practical adults who will cheerfully and apologetically insist, “I cannot draw.”

Yet, as the American art teacher Betty Edwards argues in her 1979 publication Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, in our reading-centred world, drawing is simply a different ability that falls away in childhood if we don’t display some spectacular early “talent”. And just as most of us learn how to read and write, anyone can be taught how to draw.

It’s a theory with which South African Debbie Krantz agrees as we drive to a seaside dinner on my first night in Mauritius.

“We are all born with an artistic something. It’s only as we get older that we decide we cannot paint,” she says.

And Krantz should know. With a background in interior design, she only started painting at the age of 40. Now she is the part owner of Artist Retreat Mauritius, which offers week-long drawing and painting courses for intermediate artists and, more pertinently for me, beginners “who want to ignite their passion for art for the first time”.

As I will discover over the next few days, their programme is a thrilling blend of holiday and hobby. Krantz and her business partner, Debbie Dove, a South African-born Mauritian with a Fine Arts degree and a past career in advertising and illustrating children’s books, take participants to visit some lovely island sights, then spend a few days in their studio, guiding them through the painting of it.

The locations visited change with the seasons. There may be a tea plantation at harvest time, or the salt pans in Tamarin, or the floating flower beds of the Jardin de Pamplemousses near Port Louis. For my course, day one begins at Eureka, otherwise known as La Maison Creole, in the Moka mountains in the west.

This magnificent plantation house built in the early 19th century was for generations the home of a wealthy French family, the Leclézios. Today it is a museum that hosts their ghosts. Inside, thick wooden shutters filter the light falling on their antiques, many sailed here by the East India Company, and the walls of black-and-white photos immortalising Port Louis’s dusty beginnings.

Locally, it is known as the house with 109 doors, because all the rooms are interleading and the only “corridor” is the deep verandah wrapped around its outside. This is now a café, where guests can play sugar barons as they dine on traditional Creole food and gaze out over the neat, sprawling lawns that finally surrender somewhere out there to the chaos of rambling forests. In among those tangled leaves winds a steep stone path down to several small waterfalls.

With so much history, drama and space, Eureka is a Prado of potential paintings. After a tour of the house, our little group — five students and the two Debbies — disperses to hunt for subjects to paint. The others — all with some level of experience — choose their spots to plop down their folding stools and disappear into sketching. Some face the long, low mansion and its shingled roof; one girl sits with her back to it to sketch