Metier
While reading up on the phrase “exception that proves the rule”, I discovered The Style Book of the Detroit News 🔗 from 1918. This is a great source of new words, one of which is presented in a quote from Louis Robert Stevenson:
You painter chaps make lots of studies, don’t you? And you don’t frame them all and send them to the Salon, do you? You just stick them up on the studio wall for a bit, and presently you tear them up and make more. And you copy Velasquez and Rembrandt and Vandyke and Corot; and from each you learn some little trick of the brush, some obscure little point of technic. And you know damn well that it is the knowledge thus acquired that will enable you later on to deliver your own message with a fine and confident bravado. You are simply learning your metier; and believe me, mon cher, an artist in any line without the metier is just a blind man with a stick.
A “metier”, according to Merriam-Webster 🔗, is simply a “vocation” or “trade” in this sense, but could also be “an area of activity in which one excels”.
The quote is an excerpt from With Stevenson at Grez 🔗 by the artist Birge Harrison. Stevenson is explaining to Harrison why he writes a great amount of pieces, publishes some of them, and destroys yet others.