This research paper gleans insights from significant historical cases to unravel the essence of a ‘creative milieu.’ Our study scrutinizes the factors that shaped artists’ settlement patterns in Shanghai during the Republican era (1912–1948) by constructing both global and local spatial regression models across three pivotal years, thus unveiling seven distinct variable categories. We argue that paramount among these attributes are individual art intermediaries, art schools, and art organizations. Furthermore, our inquiry acknowledges the diverse and idiosyncratic characteristics inherent to artistic communities and delineates between attributes of particular relevance to the Chinese context and those adaptable within a Western paradigm.