old master

American  

noun

1. an eminent artist of an earlier period, especially from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

2. a work by such an artist.

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old master British  

noun

1. one of the great European painters of the period 1500 to 1800

2. a painting by one of these

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Etymology

Origin of old master

First recorded in 1945–50

Example Sentences

Now that it’s an auction house, the public can walk in free and view a regularly revolving slate of offerings, from rare books to old master paintings to dinosaur skeletons, depending on the sale calendar.

From The Wall Street Journal

To teach himself to paint, he copied from old masters in the Louvre and from plants and taxidermic animals in Paris’s natural history museums.

From The Wall Street Journal

"A glorious painting by an old master would be too striking," she said.

From BBC

But we can celebrate now what Bellocchio, a driven old master, has achieved: a heartfelt thriller of intensity and intimacy in which getting saved looks an awful lot like being lost.

From Los Angeles Times

This is a bit of a switch for Tefaf, the grand old art fair started in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which started off as a place to buy deaccessioned museum pieces and bona fide old masters.

From New York Times