“He had a rather sad youth here,” recalls the businessman Jaime Zobel de Ayala, Fernando's nephew. “Those were difficult years which he took beautifully well.” He actively participated in the family business for close to 10 years. He managed the company's personnel department excellently, but at each working day's end, he rushed home to pick up the brush.

Perhaps Zobel's sense of his own complexity had to do with this background. The early part of his life might appear circuitous with decision making. He was moving back and forth between the West (the consciousness of Spain and America) and the East (the cultures of the Philippines, China, and Japan), and between what he felt to be an obligation to his family and the persistent calling of art. In the end, the muse prevailed.