Sunday painter
Americannoun
noun
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He was popular, but for a long time the critics condescended to him, calling him a lightweight Sunday painter and deriding him for his “matchstick” figures.
From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 31, 2025
The painting had been donated to the University of Arizona Museum in 1958 by wealthy Baltimore businessman Edward J. Gallagher Jr., a Sunday painter who vacationed in the area.
From Los Angeles Times • May 31, 2022
By the time of that trip, in 1887, the bourgeois Sunday painter of almost a decade earlier was gone, replaced by an artist with a new identity and history.
From New York Times • Feb. 24, 2011
This is a cultured, successful stockbroker in his late 20s, and you find yourself mentally turning the face of the Sunday painter to the future and to everything still only latent within it.
From The Guardian • Oct. 1, 2010
When Dolly divorces Smackenfelt for Zap Spontini, an advertising man and lousy Sunday painter, Blodgett is rewarded.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
