Learn English – the opposite of a prodigy

antonymssingle-word-requestssynonyms

I'm looking for a single word, or a succinct phrase to describe an artist that achieves greatness after a lot of hard work and repeated failures, rather than someone who was naturally talented.

The closest equivalent I could think of was Journeyman, but that doesn't have the connotations of achieving greatness. Is there a better word to describe such an artist?

Best Answer

Dan Bron wrote in a comment:

The word, extending your guild-theme, is master. As in master painter, master chef, chessmaster, the Dutch Masters, and so on. A journeyman is exactly the person who's pretty good at something but hasn't mastered it yet (the old guild system went apprentice -> journeyman -> master, which happened after the journeyman became sufficiently experienced to produce his masterpiece, the medieval analog of a master's thesis or doctoral thesis or that thing the art kids have to do to graduate).

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