adjective

• Having failed to become what one might have been.

  ‘he was a creature of suppressed passions, an artist manqué’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Minnelli had his own professional Scotsman who, being something of an artist manqué, plied Minnelli with proposed rewrites of the script.’
  • ‘They are not simply middle-class parents manqué; they have their own culture of child rearing.’
  • ‘She is an American art critic manqué who travels Europe with her son in an eternally unfinished project to catalogue the best and most interesting Western masterpieces.’
  • ‘I am an architect manqué.’
  • ‘Editors manqué among non-editorial executives are not in a position to give the task the full-time concentration it demands.’
  • ‘Brown is a historian manqué with an impressive cultural range.’
  • ‘He, too was a writer manqué who had begun by producing a bad novel and a play which no theatre would put on.’
  • ‘Busted Flush, Smith's third novel, revolves around Dock Bass, a carpenter turned realtor manqué who abandons a life of futility in New York state to answer a mysterious writ from a law firm in Gettysburg.’
  • ‘A questionably reliable theological student manqué narrates this work, in contrast with an anonymous third-person narrator used in Colter's previous novels.’
  • ‘Born in Felixstowe, England, he is an architect manqué.’
  • ‘As poet and dramatist, he is most often seen as a genius manqué, whose learning and energy were never sufficiently disciplined.’
  • ‘Shearer even took notes, like the coach manqué that he is.’
  • ‘The Violin Concerto was very much a labour of love, as one would expect from a violinist manqué who had nursed youthful ambitions as a soloist.’
  • ‘Being a Cambridge philosopher manqué I tend to have a more brutal constructivist approach to this sort of thing.’
  • ‘I always see most of what I write, and am, in fact, a painter manqué.’