In fact, he created several boats considered beauties, if not masterpieces — his Gloucester light dory, for example.
My time at the Venice film festival has now come to an end – I hand over to Xan Brooks – and I'm leaving with a sense that this festival is actually much better than it had been cracked up to be, with an interesting, lively competition list and if not masterpieces exactly, then some real and pleasurable surprises.
The beauty of the work, a true if tired masterpiece, saved it.
It was as if a masterpiece of nature had been repainted with a colour scheme more befitting a pound shop.
It's as if that masterpiece of literary DNA, "Moby-Dick," generated a new strain of life before our eyes.
As my family and I set out to visit them, we realized we had previously been inside only one Wright building, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a dreamy if arrogant masterpiece whose curving white walls seem designed to outshine the paintings.
The artist Tracey Emin visited Downing Street yesterday to deliver a letter signed by Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley, David Hockney and 37 other artists urging the Prime Minister to help raise the £50m needed to save a Renaissance painting for the nation – or face "embarrassment" if the masterpiece is sold abroad.
In that atmosphere, Picassos no matter how spoofy, were sought after as if they were masterpieces.
On view as well are several of art history's most familiar, if least exhibited, masterpieces.
Both of those films are, if not outright masterpieces, at least in complete control of their tense and writhing themes, and I long for Haneke to cast his cold eye on the nervous impulses of the English-speaking nations.
