old master
6
8.4
- noun
- /oʊld ˈmæstər/
- Specialized
:
maestro antiguo
- Many art collectors aspire to own a painting by an old master such as Rembrandt or Vermeer.
- Old Master paintings
- works of the old masters
- exhibition of Old Master
Examples
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I will bring this to our country and offer it so gentlemen can learn the old masters.
Academic text (2015) -
Many were old masters that Scharf obtained from an ambitious trawl of the country's artistic heritage.
Academic text (2012) -
Well you just come along and watch the old master at work.
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This one in particular is an old master.
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Young, fair-haired boy wants to learn from the old master.
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The old masters always loved a good harvest theme.
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The new director of the Angers museums is a specialist in old masters.
Blog text (33) -
He learned all he could about the old masters, their biographies, their techniques and their materials.
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At its full extent, the Darby collection probably encompassed approximately two hundred paintings, most of them old masters.
Academic text (2012) -
Having been much extended and remodeled, Stoke Court played host to Darby's large collection of old master paintings.
Academic text (2012)
Surface Forms
Morphology
At surface level 'old master' could be parsed as 'an older skilled person', but the MWE denotes a specific art‑historical category (a renowned pre‑19th‑century European painter or a work by such an artist). This specialized, lexicalized meaning is not predictable from 'old' and 'master' alone, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would likely not infer the painting-related sense.
Etymology
Old master The noun old master comes from old art workshops where a master was the most skilled artist and old showed they worked long ago. Collectors used the phrase for famous painters like Rembrandt, so today old master means 'a great painter' or 'a painting by such an artist' from before the 19th century.