(n.) Anything done or made with extraordinary skill; a capital performance; a chef-d'oeuvre; a supreme achievement.
Example Sentences:
(1) Thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and countless donations from individuals and groups, this wonderful picture – a masterpiece by any standards – will be enjoyed, free of charge, in the National Portrait Gallery for many generations to come."
(2) Some say Film Socialism is an eccentric masterpiece ; others that it's an eccentric mess.
(3) In that context, the amount paid for late-career work like Women of Algiers is probably a good investment; while it has nowhere near the raw energy of early masterpieces such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) or the significance of mid-career icons such as Guernica (1937), in an international market where the artist’s name casts a spell on potential buyers, it’s a respectable piece that can be immediately identified as a “Picasso”.
(4) In the 1990s he was almost incapable of not writing a masterpiece – The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, I Married a Communist.
(5) Even more graphically than Picasso’s Women of Algiers with their multiple breasts and bums, Nu couché is a sensual masterpiece – and far more conventionally so than anything Picasso painted.
(6) It was described as one of the artist's masterpieces by David Moore-Gwyn, deputy chairman in the UK of Sotheby's, which will auction the painting in December.
(7) Acting on a request from the PCGG, French police raided two of Khashoggi’s apartments and found paperwork confirming that many of the masterpieces were now in his hands.
(8) Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The past in all its mortal beauty’: Las Meninas, the 1656 Velazquez masterpiece that held Laura Cumming spellbound at the Prado in Madrid.
(9) Its hoarding proclaims: "An unashamedly ultra-modern masterpiece emerges alongside the most celebrated of cathedrals."
(10) The comments, which follow Clooney's repeated claims over the past week that Britain should return the Parthenon marbles to Greece, were reportedly made in Milan at a press event during which the film's cast posed in front of the famed Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece The Last Supper.
(11) This misanthropic masterpiece says it all for them.
(12) It starts to feel like it’s a process where if you give money you solve the problem, and really sometimes giving money creates another problem.” When he was told there was just one African-born performer on the track, he said: “That’s great, just a few more would be nice and also maybe go there – all those people who are making that.” Ultravox’s Midge Ure said the song was by no means a masterpiece, but is more about getting people as engaged with the fight against Ebola as they were in 1984, when a total of £8m was raised.
(13) Just as Banksy causes collateral damage to the neatness of walls, so Amazon's masterpiece is a defacement of the public purse.
(14) "Films should contain musical masterpieces like these," Kim Jong-il writes in his book, "the fusion of noble ideas and burning passion."
(15) The quartet wrestles its way to the end of Shostakovich's unquiet masterpiece, the reprised Largo with its complex contrition and very adult fears.
(16) Over on BBC2, a Planet Earth repeat attracted 1.4 million viewers and a 7% share at 6.40pm, with Private Life of an Easter Masterpiece: The Taking of Christ drew 1 million and 4% between 7.40pm and 8.30pm.
(17) I think of Al Gore's policy-heavy acceptance speech at the 2000 Dems convention as a masterpiece of substance and attack (and another game-changer in that it dramatically closed the gap with Bush after months of lagging), so I hope Brown's had his people working for weeks on some genuinely fresh, new ideas.
(18) And in the room in the National Gallery where this painting hangs, among such supreme masterpieces of British oil painting as Turner's Fighting Temeraire and Stubbs's Whistlejacket, you can turn from Constable's pain to study its subject ... and be baffled.
(19) In that same National season, he teamed with Simon Callow (as Face) and Josie Lawrence (as Doll Common) in a co-production by Bill Alexander for the Birmingham Rep of Ben Jonson’s trickstering, two-faced masterpiece The Alchemist ; he was a comically pious Subtle in sackcloth and sandals.
(20) But were these masterpieces really burned in allied air raids?
Mastership
Definition:
(n.) The state or office of a master.
(n.) Mastery; dominion; superior skill; superiority.
(n.) Chief work; masterpiece.
(n.) An ironical title of respect.
Example Sentences:
(1) He never seriously hid his enthusiasm for the two main innovations of his mastership - the opening of male-only Balliol to women, and the representation of students on the college governing body.